Anniversary Classics Archives

George Cukor’s ‘Let’s Make Love’ Spotlights Jack Cole Choreography

August 4, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle 1 Comment

On Wednesday, Aug. 19th, at 7 p.m., Laemmle Theatres presents a 65th anniversary screening of Let’s Make Love, Marilyn Monroe’s penultimate film, spotlighting the astonishing dance work of choreographer Jack Cole.

Catch Let’s Make Love at the Laemmle Royal, with Cole biographer Debra Levine in attendance to sign her book JAZZED: Jack Cole and Twentieth Century American Dance.

In 1959 Marilyn was entering her final chapter—with her favorite choreographer, Jack Cole, in tow. As Monroe’s decade, the 1950s, wound to a close, the indelible movie star was not in good shape. Repeated breakdowns and hospitalizations had taken their toll. When Let’s Make Love producer Jerry Wald reached out to Cole for what would be his sixth-and-final Monroe movie, Cole was evasive. Eventually, needing money, he acquiesced. Toward the end of a grueling seven-month shoot, with only Cole, Monroe, and scant crew on set, Let’s Make Love had the feel of a home movie. Cole got the star across the finish line. But, he said, “It was very difficult.” Seen in retrospect, the film’s centerpiece production number, to Cole Porter’s “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” is a danse-macabre, a foreshadowing of tragic events to come.

This summary, contributed by Debra Levine, a friend of Laemmle’s Anniversary Classics Series, is adapted from her brand-new Jack Cole biography, JAZZED: Jack Cole and Twentieth Century American Dance, from University Press of Kentucky (release date August 11, 2026). Debra, who will be our interview guest on August 19, will share revelations from her deep research into the making of this movie through the prism of the close Monroe/Cole relationship, a trove of information that many traditional forays into Marilyn’s final films have overlooked. Debra will be selling and signing her acclaimed book after the screening.

Let’s Make Love was Marilyn’s second last film, made in part to fulfill her contract to 20th Century Fox. Her co-star was iconic French actor Yves Montand, the star of such classic films as The Wages of Fear and the French version of The Crucible. Hollywood often wooed revered European actors, and Montand spent several years making American movies in the 1960s before returning to Europe to make Z, The Confession, Cesar and Rosalie, and Jean de Florette. He and Monroe had a brief affair during the shooting of Let’s Make Love, which he abruptly broke off, aggravating Marilyn’s insecurities.

The script by Norman Krasna and Hal Kanter, with uncredited assist by Arthur Miller, Monroe’s husband at the time, centers on a European billionaire who learns that he is going to be satirized in a new off-Broadway production and decides to investigate by trying to join the production with a false identity. Award-winning director George Cukor (Little Women, Born Yesterday, Adam’s Rib, A Star Is Born, My Fair Lady) was at the helm of the production. Cukor, cinematographer Daniel L. Fapp, art directors Gene Allen and Lyle Wheeler, and costume designer Dorothy Jeakins assured that Monroe was most alluringly photographed.

The supporting cast includes Tony Randall, Frankie Vaughan, and Wilfred Hyde-White, with cameos by Gene Kelly, Bing Crosby, and Milton Berle as experts trying to train the amateur Montand for his theater debut.

As critic Stanley Kauffmann observed, “The scene in which Milton Berle teaches [Montand] how to be a comic is first-rate knockabout fun.”

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.

Anniversary Classics Presents: Revisiting Henry & June With Philip Kaufman

December 31, 2025 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

First on the 2026 docket for Laemmle Theatres’ Anniversary Classics Series comes Philip Kaufman’s Henry & June, a film that helped redraw the boundaries around what American cinema could openly explore. Released in 1990, it was the first film to receive the NC-17 rating, a designation that became inseparable from its reputation, but which only partially explains its lasting appeal. More than a provocation, Henry & June is a lush, literary meditation on desire, authorship, and the porous line between lived experience and art.

Get your tickets today to see Henry & June on Sunday, January 11th, 2026 at the Laemmle Royal, kicked off by a pre-screening discussion with director Philip Kaufman moderated by Stephen Farber, ex-president of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association (which will be honoring Kaufman with their Career Achievement Award the day prior) and host of Reel Talk at Laemmle Theatres.

Set in 1930s Paris, the film draws from the diaries of Anaïs Nin, whose encounters with the fledgling writer Henry Miller (still working on his masterpiece-to-be Tropic of Cancer) and his enigmatic wife June catalyze both personal and creative awakenings. Kaufman treats this triangle less as a conventional erotic drama than as a shifting constellation of gazes and power. Anaïs, played with quiet intensity by Maria de Medeiros, begins as an observer—absorbing, recording, translating sensation into language—before gradually stepping into her own erotic and artistic agency. Fred Ward’s Henry is all swagger and verbal excess, while Uma Thurman’s June is an apparition, at once muse, manipulator, and mirror for the myriad desires projected onto her.

What distinguishes Henry & June is its attention to interiority. Kaufman visualizes thought and memory as tactile experiences: ink bleeding across paper, shadows pooling in lamplit rooms, bodies framed as if already being remembered. The film’s eroticism is inseparable from its interest in writing itself, in how confession, exaggeration, and performance shape identity. Sex here is never reduced to spectacle for its own sake, but a language through which the characters attempt to define themselves.

Following Henry & June’s release, the controversy surrounding its NC-17 rating often obscured how carefully crafted the film really is. Its sensuality is deliberate and measured, rooted in atmosphere rather than shock, while its emotional core lies in Anaïs’s struggle to reconcile intimacy with autonomy. Kaufman resists easy moralizing, allowing contradictions to coexist: freedom and dependency, inspiration and exploitation, love and self-invention.

Seen today, Henry & June feels less like a boundary-pushing outlier than a throwback to a brief moment in time when American studios were willing to support adult, intellectually curious filmmaking that trusted audiences to engage with such complexity. Its frankness remains striking, but so does its elegance, as well as its belief that erotic experience can be cinematic without being reductive or vulgar. More than three decades on, the film endures as a portrait of artists in formation and as a sensual inquiry into how stories—especially the ones we tell about ourselves—come into being.