Author Archives: Chicago Film Society

The Auditorium at Northeastern Illinois University – Building E, 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave
General Admission: $7 • NEIU Students: $3

Tuesday, June 26 @ 7:30 PM / NEIU
DOUBLE SUICIDE
Directed by Masahiro Shinoda • 1969
In Japanese with English subtitles
Forbidden love between a married paper merchant (Kichiemon Nakamura) and a courtesan (Shima Iwashita) moves inevitably towards tragedy and annihilation in this startling adaptation of a famous 1721 bunraku (puppet drama) from Japan’s foremost playwright Monzaemon Chikamatsu. (When Double Suicide opened in New York concurrently with Kenji Mizoguchi’s more classically mounted Chikamatsu adaptation, The Crucified Lovers, The New York Times celebrated the unlikely development, observing that this 18th century legend had become “like Shakespeare, like Neil Simon, one of the better represented dramatists in the city … Unlike Neil Simon, his mode is tragedy.”) An early production of the Art Theatre Guild, the ribald studio that would incubate projects by such Japanese New Wave stalwarts as Shōhei Imamura, Nagisa Oshima, and Toshio Matsumoto, Double Suicide is anything but a staid and reverent treatment of a classic. In translating the story to cinema, Masahiro Shinoda (Pale Flower, Silence) achieves radical ends by affirming its theatrical roots, mixing the story proper with footage of puppets and sets and stagehands, effectively kicking and stomping across the fourth wall. With music by Toru Takemitsu, who also takes his first and only screenwriting credit. (KW)
104 min • Art Theatre Guild • 35mm from Janus
Short: “Budulinek and the Little Foxes” (Anna Vesela and Vaclav Zykmund, c. 1950) – 10 min – 35mm

View the rest of the current season here!

The Auditorium at Northeastern Illinois University – Building E, 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave
General Admission: $7 • NEIU Students: $3

Wednesday, June 20 @ 7:30 PM
THE HAPPY TIME
Directed by Richard Fleischer • 1952
While waiting over a year for mercurial RKO head Howard Hughes to sign off on his B-picture breakthrough, The Narrow Margin, journeyman filmmaker Richard Fleischer anxiously dreamt of moving up a rung or two in the Hollywood racket. The opportunity finally came when Stanley Kramer offered Fleischer the chance to direct The Happy Time for his eponymous production company at Columbia — a project that Fleischer giddily described as “no melodrama, no murders, no evil wooden puppets, but people, warm, human, alive, and funny.” Based on a Robert Fontaine novel that had already been imported to Broadway by Rodgers and Hammerstein (oddly, not as a musical — that would have to wait for the Kander & Ebb version of 1968), The Happy Time is a curious effort to bring together the sentimental coming-of-age story and the ever-so-slightly-blue sex comedy. (The original tagline: “Finally a Film on That Touchy Titillating Topic!”) Disney mainstay Bobby Driscoll stars as Robert ‘Bibi’ Bonard, a French-Canadian kid growing up in Ottawa in the mid-1920s. Surrounded by a family of aspiring roués (uncle Louis Jourdan, “the Casanova of Canada”), aging carousers (grandpère Marcel Dalio), and unaccountably level-headed folks (father Charles Boyer), Bibi develops a crush on magician’s-assistant-turned-housemaid Mignonette (Linda Christian) and learns to stick up for himself. (KW)
94 min • Stanley Kramer Productions • 35mm from Sony Pictures Repertory
Short: “Your Thrift Habits” (Coronet Films, 1948) – 11 min – 16mm

Music Box Theatre – 3733 N. Southport Ave.
General Admission: $10

Monday, June 18 @ 7:00 PM
RIO BRAVO
Directed by Howard Hawks • 1959
What is a Western? If you come to the genre expecting expansive natural landscapes, daring feats of horsemanship, and a deep engagement with the trailways of American history, then Rio Bravo falls flat on its face like a hooch-guzzling saloon dweller. If you want your Westerns to be about relationships, honor, purple light in the canyon, and the inexhaustibly fine line between “good” and “good enough,” then Rio Bravo is just about perfect. Conceived for the narrowly parochial purpose of rebutting the whiny indecisiveness of High Noon, Howard Hawks and his screenwriters Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett crafted a response so rich in human detail as to make the casus belli irrelevant. John Wayne stars as John T. Chance, a small town sheriff who must keep the peace with a task force that embarrasses his conservative sense of professionalism: a drunken deputy (Dean Martin), a guitar-slinging kid (dreamy Ricky Nelson), a game-legged oldster (dreamy Walter Brennan), a fiercely independent woman (stunning Angie Dickinson), and a loquacious hotel-keeper (Pedro Gonzalez-Gonzalez). Make no mistake: Rio Bravo is an ambling, seemingly shapeless movie that thinks nothing of stopping the action for a song or two, but the screenplay is a genuine model of economy and an endless fount of arid wisdom. (Sample dialogue from Wayne: “I’d say he’s so good, he doesn’t feel he has to prove it.”) Photographed in fade-prone Eastmancolor but originally released in Technicolor prints, Rio Bravo has been cursed in later years with substandard copies that look about as appealing as Dean Martin’s stubbled chin. We are proud to present one of our favorite films in a sparkling IB Technicolor print. (KW)
141 min • Warner Bros. • 35mm IB Tech from private collections, permission Warner Bros.
Preceded by: ’50s Westerns Trailer Reel

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And coming later this week …

The Auditorium at Northeastern Illinois University – Building E, 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave
General Admission: $7 • NEIU Students: $3

Wednesday, June 20 @ 7:30 PM
THE HAPPY TIME
Directed by Richard Fleischer • 1952
While waiting over a year for mercurial RKO head Howard Hughes to sign off on his B-picture breakthrough, The Narrow Margin, journeyman filmmaker Richard Fleischer anxiously dreamt of moving up a rung or two in the Hollywood racket. The opportunity finally came when Stanley Kramer offered Fleischer the chance to direct The Happy Time for his eponymous production company at Columbia — a project that Fleischer giddily described as “no melodrama, no murders, no evil wooden puppets, but people, warm, human, alive, and funny.” Based on a Robert Fontaine novel that had already been imported to Broadway by Rodgers and Hammerstein (oddly, not as a musical — that would have to wait for the Kander & Ebb version of 1968), The Happy Time is a curious effort to bring together the sentimental coming-of-age story and the ever-so-slightly-blue sex comedy. (The original tagline: “Finally a Film on That Touchy Titillating Topic!”) Disney mainstay Bobby Driscoll stars as Robert ‘Bibi’ Bonard, a French-Canadian kid growing up in Ottawa in the mid-1920s. Surrounded by a family of aspiring roués (uncle Louis Jourdan, “the Casanova of Canada”), aging carousers (grandpère Marcel Dalio), and unaccountably level-headed folks (father Charles Boyer), Bibi develops a crush on magician’s-assistant-turned-housemaid Mignonette (Linda Christian) and learns to stick up for himself. (KW)
94 min • Stanley Kramer Productions • 35mm from Sony Pictures Repertory
Short: “Your Thrift Habits” (Coronet Films, 1948) – 11 min – 16mm

Music Box Theatre – 3733 N. Southport Ave.
General Admission: $11 • Seniors: $9 • MBT Members: $7

Saturday, June 16 @ 11:30 AM 
FEEL MY PULSE
Directed by Gregory La Cava • 1928
Live Organ Accompaniment from Dennis Scott
Bebe Daniels began her acting career at the age of seven; by fourteen, she was a frequent co-star of Harold Lloyd, with whom she made dozens of comedies under the “Lonesome Luke” banner. Towards the end of the silent era, Daniels had become a star and accomplished comedienne in her own right, though many of her most intriguing and subversive films from this period (e.g., She’s a Sheik) are now presumed lost. Among the handful that survive, Feel My Pulse is a rollicking comedy that offers Daniels a wonderful showcase for her knockabout antics and subtler character work. Directed by former cartoonist Gregory La Cava, who also fashioned a surprisingly effective silent comedian out of W.C. Fields in So’s Your Old Man and Running Wild, Feel My Pulse follows hypochondriac heiress Daniels to an island sanitarium where everything is not as it seems. The doctor (William Powell) is really a bootlegger in disguise and all the attendants, save for undercover reporter Richard Arlen, are lieutenants in his rum-running army. The kind of witty and unpretentious comedy at which Paramount excelled, Feel My Pulse never aspired to be anything more than an evening’s entertainment — but after seeing it, you’ll never look at surgical equipment the same way again. (KW)
63 min • Paramount Pictures • 35mm from Library of Congress
Short: “The Hasher’s Delirium” (Émile Cohl, 1910) – 5 min – 16mm

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And if that isn’t enough …

Music Box Theatre – 3733 N. Southport Ave.
General Admission: $10

Monday, June 18 @ 7:00 PM
RIO BRAVO
Directed by Howard Hawks • 1959
What is a Western? If you come to the genre expecting expansive natural landscapes, daring feats of horsemanship, and a deep engagement with the trailways of American history, then Rio Bravo falls flat on its face like a hooch-guzzling saloon dweller. If you want your Westerns to be about relationships, honor, purple light in the canyon, and the inexhaustibly fine line between “good” and “good enough,” then Rio Bravo is just about perfect. Conceived for the narrowly parochial purpose of rebutting the whiny indecisiveness of High Noon, Howard Hawks and his screenwriters Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett crafted a response so rich in human detail as to make the casus belli irrelevant. John Wayne stars as John T. Chance, a small town sheriff who must keep the peace with a task force that embarrasses his conservative sense of professionalism: a drunken deputy (Dean Martin), a guitar-slinging kid (dreamy Ricky Nelson), a game-legged oldster (dreamy Walter Brennan), a fiercely independent woman (stunning Angie Dickinson), and a loquacious hotel-keeper (Pedro Gonzalez-Gonzalez). Make no mistake: Rio Bravo is an ambling, seemingly shapeless movie that thinks nothing of stopping the action for a song or two, but the screenplay is a genuine model of economy and an endless fount of arid wisdom. (Sample dialogue from Wayne: “I’d say he’s so good, he doesn’t feel he has to prove it.”) Photographed in fade-prone Eastmancolor but originally released in Technicolor prints, Rio Bravo has been cursed in later years with substandard copies that look about as appealing as Dean Martin’s stubbled chin. We are proud to present one of our favorite films in a sparkling IB Technicolor print. (KW)
141 min • Warner Bros. • 35mm IB Tech from private collections, permission Warner Bros.
Preceded by: ’50s Westerns Trailer Reel

The Auditorium at Northeastern Illinois University – Building E, 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave
General Admission: $7 • NEIU Students: $3

Tuesday, June 5 @ 7:30 PM
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN
Directed by Charles Vidor • 1952
Danny Kaye, here at his very best, plays Hans Christian Andersen in this not-biopic, a gorgeous Technicolor musical which has next to no relation to the much-stranger-in-real-life man behind The Ugly Duckling and The Red Shoes. Exiled from his hometown of Odense, Denmark, for corrupting the minds of school children with fables, Andersen and his assistant cobbler Peter leave for Copenhagen, quickly driven to distraction by the French Ballerina Zizi Jeanmaire. Babyface Farley Granger plays the brutish ballet producer, though he doesn’t turn out to be such a bad guy. A pet project of producer Samuel Goldwyn, the film was in pre-production for fourteen years and went through sixteen different screenplays before it was finally produced. The trailer boasted that Goldwyn had never spent so many millions, and it even caused an international dispute when the people of Denmark feared their hero was being disgraced by this American mega-production. (Kaye himself was sent to smooth things over.) Happily, the money shows up on screen: beautiful, lavish sets and costumes, a delightful and luxurious twenty-minute ballet sequence, and eight perpetually hummable musical numbers, all in glorious Technicolor. (JA)
112 min • Samuel Goldwyn • 35mm IB Technicolor from private collections, permission Park Circus
Short: “Alice in Wonderland: Act II” (Ruth Page, 1977) – 7 min – 16mm from Chicago Film Archives

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And don’t forget about our monthly silent screening at the Music Box

Music Box Theatre – 3733 N. Southport Ave.
General Admission: $11 • Seniors: $9 • MBT Members: $7

Saturday, June 16 @ 11:30 AM 
FEEL MY PULSE
Directed by Gregory La Cava • 1928
Live Organ Accompaniment from Dennis Scott
Bebe Daniels began her acting career at the age of seven; by fourteen, she was a frequent co-star of Harold Lloyd, with whom she made dozens of comedies under the “Lonesome Luke” banner. Towards the end of the silent era, Daniels had become a star and accomplished comedienne in her own right, though many of her most intriguing and subversive films from this period (e.g., She’s a Sheik) are now presumed lost. Among the handful that survive, Feel My Pulse is a rollicking comedy that offers Daniels a wonderful showcase for her knockabout antics and subtler character work. Directed by former cartoonist Gregory La Cava, who also fashioned a surprisingly effective silent comedian out of W.C. Fields in So’s Your Old Man and Running Wild, Feel My Pulse follows hypochondriac heiress Daniels to an island sanitarium where everything is not as it seems. The doctor (William Powell) is really a bootlegger in disguise and all the attendants, save for undercover reporter Richard Arlen, are lieutenants in his rum-running army. The kind of witty and unpretentious comedy at which Paramount excelled, Feel My Pulse never aspired to be anything more than an evening’s entertainment — but after seeing it, you’ll never look at surgical equipment the same way again. (KW)
63 min • Paramount Pictures • 35mm from Library of Congress
Short: “The Hasher’s Delirium” (Émile Cohl, 1910) – 5 min – 16mm

The Auditorium at Northeastern Illinois University – Building E, 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave
General Admission: $7 • NEIU Students: $3

Wednesday, May 30 @ 7:30 PM
GABBEH
Directed by Mohsen Makhmalbaf • 1996
In Farsi with English subtitles
The massively vital and influential Tehrani director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, perhaps best known to Western audiences for playing himself in Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up, scored an unexpected art house hit in 1997 with this strange and beautiful fable which defies easy (or even complex) categorization. Is Gabbeh a rich, circular, endlessly fertile film-poem slyly masquerading as a simple folk tale? Or is it an explosive meditation on color, texture, and the act of seeing, disguised as an easygoing narrative that pushes us toward a gentle reimagining of film language? It’s all of these things, and perhaps none of them as well. The title refers to a style of hand-woven, hand-dyed carpet made by rural nomads of southern Iran, the design of which often depicts an abstracted narrative. We first glimpse the eponymous carpet being washed in a clear stream; soon, the submerged gabbeh becomes Gabbeh, a mysterious young woman whose story the rug (and the film) will seem to depict. This soft transformation is just the first of many small, heart-stopping moments of ecstatic poetry. Those who surrender to the film’s quiet authority will be rewarded: the central tale of Gabbeh’s reckless desire to escape her family and elope with a distant lupine figure is deftly and powerfully interwoven with riveting episodes showing her tribe’s rug-making process, an unforgettable dyeing lesson, and the occasional unexplained mystical digression. (GW)
75 min • MK2 Productions • 35mm from CFS Collections, permission Arrow Films
Short: “The Red Thread” (Larry Gottheim, 1987) – 17 min – 16mm from Canyon Cinema

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And if that wasn’t colorful enough for ya …

The Auditorium at Northeastern Illinois University – Building E, 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave
General Admission: $7 • NEIU Students: $3

Tuesday, June 5 @ 7:30 PM
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN
Directed by Charles Vidor • 1952
Danny Kaye, here at his very best, plays Hans Christian Andersen in this not-biopic, a gorgeous Technicolor musical which has next to no relation to the much-stranger-in-real-life man behind The Ugly Duckling and The Red Shoes. Exiled from his hometown of Odense, Denmark, for corrupting the minds of school children with fables, Andersen and his assistant cobbler Peter leave for Copenhagen, quickly driven to distraction by the French Ballerina Zizi Jeanmaire. Babyface Farley Granger plays the brutish ballet producer, though he doesn’t turn out to be such a bad guy. A pet project of producer Samuel Goldwyn, the film was in pre-production for fourteen years and went through sixteen different screenplays before it was finally produced. The trailer boasted that Goldwyn had never spent so many millions, and it even caused an international dispute when the people of Denmark feared their hero was being disgraced by this American mega-production. (Kaye himself was sent to smooth things over.) Happily, the money shows up on screen: beautiful, lavish sets and costumes, a delightful and luxurious twenty-minute ballet sequence, and eight perpetually hummable musical numbers, all in glorious Technicolor. (JA)
112 min • Samuel Goldwyn • 35mm IB Technicolor from private collections, permission Park Circus
Short: “Alice in Wonderland: Act II” (Ruth Page, 1977) – 7 min – 16mm from Chicago Film Archives

Music Box Theatre – 3733 N. Southport Ave.
General Admission: $10

Monday, May 28 @ 6:00 PM
70mm SHORTS SHOWCASE, VOL. 2
 The Cinema-180 Adventure Theater sounds like a truly awful place to see a movie. In between rides at Great Adventure Theme Parks, audience members would shuffle in to an enormous screening room with a concrete floor covered in indoor/outdoor carpet, staring at a 180-degree curved screen held in place by suction for a neck-straining eleven minutes. Much like the outdoor screenings offered by well meaning but technologically inept park districts, the screen would deflate at the end of the night, sagging mightily. We’ll be creating this experience, though regrettably under much better technical circumstances, when we screen the 1983 ride film International Thrill Show as part of our second ever 70mm shorts program at the Music Box. Back by popular demand, we’ve combed the world for films that use 70mm’s wide, clear frame to enchant, delight, and terrify. Also screening: A Year Along the Abandoned Road (Morten Skallerud, 1991, 70mm DTS from Panavision), a time lapse film shot over the course of one year in Børfjord, Norway; Tanakh Bibelen al-Quran (Ole Mads Sirks Vevle, 2007, 70mm DTS from Norwegian Film Institute) a film of every page of the Bible, Quran, and Tanakh shot rapidly in sequence; a condensed version of the 1958 Russian Travelogue Great is My Country (70mm with magnetic sound from CFS collections); plus rare clips, trailers, and more. Buckle up for “an action packed sensory movie experience!” (JA)
Approx run time: 90 min

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The Auditorium at Northeastern Illinois University – Building E, 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave
General Admission: $7 • NEIU Students: $3

Wednesday, May 30 @ 7:30 PM
GABBEH
Directed by Mohsen Makhmalbaf • 1996
In Farsi with English subtitles
The massively vital and influential Tehrani director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, perhaps best known to Western audiences for playing himself in Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up, scored an unexpected art house hit in 1997 with this strange and beautiful fable which defies easy (or even complex) categorization. Is Gabbeh a rich, circular, endlessly fertile film-poem slyly masquerading as a simple folk tale? Or is it an explosive meditation on color, texture, and the act of seeing, disguised as an easygoing narrative that pushes us toward a gentle reimagining of film language? It’s all of these things, and perhaps none of them as well. The title refers to a style of hand-woven, hand-dyed carpet made by rural nomads of southern Iran, the design of which often depicts an abstracted narrative. We first glimpse the eponymous carpet being washed in a clear stream; soon, the submerged gabbeh becomes Gabbeh, a mysterious young woman whose story the rug (and the film) will seem to depict. This soft transformation is just the first of many small, heart-stopping moments of ecstatic poetry. Those who surrender to the film’s quiet authority will be rewarded: the central tale of Gabbeh’s reckless desire to escape her family and elope with a distant lupine figure is deftly and powerfully interwoven with riveting episodes showing her tribe’s rug-making process, an unforgettable dyeing lesson, and the occasional unexplained mystical digression. (GW)
75 min • MK2 Productions • 35mm from CFS Collections, permission Arrow Films
Short: “The Red Thread” (Larry Gottheim, 1987) – 17 min – 16mm from Canyon Cinema

The Auditorium at Northeastern Illinois University – Building E, 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave
General Admission: $7 • NEIU Students: $3

Tuesday, May 22 @ 7:30 PM
BUCK AND THE PREACHER
Directed by Sidney Poitier • 1972
A very loose Western adaptation of the story of Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt, Buck and the Preacher stars Sidney Poitier as a former soldier leading black wagon trains to unsettled territories in Kansas with his wife Ruby Dee and the very squirrely Harry Belafonte. Joseph Sargent was originally slated to direct this Columbia Pictures/Belafonte Enterprises co-production, but was fired by Harry Belafonte and replaced by Poitier shortly after the production began filming in Mexico. The first Western directed by an African American for a major studio, Buck and the Preacher is most decidedly not a blaxploitation film, though it is one of the only Westerns to seriously portray the role of African Americans in the West, and a great revisionist Western in its own right. Reflecting the delicate line that Poitier’s film had to walk in the marketplace, the New York Times sought to reassure genre fanatics that Buck was a “loose, amiable, post‐Civil War Western with a firm though not especially severe Black Conscience. The film is aware of contemporary black issues but its soul is on the plains once ridden by Tom Mix, whom Poitier, astride his galloping horse, his jaw set, somehow resembles in the majestic traveling shots given him by the director.” With music by jazz legend Benny Carter and the most intense harmonica playing you’ve ever heard over opening credits by Sonny Terry. (JA)
102 min • Columbia Pictures • 35mm from Sony Pictures Repertory
Short: Production Featurette for Duel at Diablo (Ralph Nelson, 1966) – 7 min – 16mm

The Auditorium at Northeastern Illinois University – Building E, 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave
General Admission: $7 • NEIU Students: $3

Tuesday, May 15 @ 7:30 PM
COOGAN’S BLUFF
Directed by Don Siegel • 1968
Established on the heels of his beloved trilogy of films with Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood’s Malpaso Company provided the auteur-movie star with a space where he could work quickly and efficiently on projects that alternately reinforced and challenged his iconic screen presence. A highly effective action policier typical of early Malpaso product, Coogan’s Bluff was the first film to pair the actor with director Don Siegel, who would go on to direct Clint in four more indelible pictures and who would exert a considerable influence over Eastwood’s own directorial efforts. Eastwood stars as Arizona cowboy cop Walt Coogan, sent to the big city to extradite an acid-gobbling hippie gang leader charged with murder back West. In his quest to bring his man in and bed every woman half his age in New York, Coogan, ever the good libertarian, takes a fast and loose approach to “due process” and manages to alienate just about every person sucked into the chaos that surrounds him. As with any good Eastwood picture, the actor imbues his character with a nasty charm that’s wholly magnetic even as Coogan’s actions often appear far from heroic. Siegel, for his part, further proves his action bonafides with a handful of the greatest helicopter shots ever put to film and an absolute monster of a climatic motorcycle chase. (CW)
93 min. • The Malpaso Company • 35mm from Universal
Short: “The Beguiled: The Storyteller” (Clint Eastwood, 1971) – 12 min – 35mm

———

And coming next week:

The Auditorium at Northeastern Illinois University – Building E, 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave
General Admission: $7 • NEIU Students: $3

Tuesday, May 22 @ 7:30 PM
BUCK AND THE PREACHER
Directed by Sidney Poitier • 1972
A very loose Western adaptation of the story of Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt, Buck and the Preacher stars Sidney Poitier as a former soldier leading black wagon trains to unsettled territories in Kansas with his wife Ruby Dee and the very squirrely Harry Belafonte. Joseph Sargent was originally slated to direct this Columbia Pictures/Belafonte Enterprises co-production, but was fired by Harry Belafonte and replaced by Poitier shortly after the production began filming in Mexico. The first Western directed by an African American for a major studio, Buck and the Preacher is most decidedly not a blaxploitation film, though it is one of the only Westerns to seriously portray the role of African Americans in the West, and a great revisionist Western in its own right. Reflecting the delicate line that Poitier’s film had to walk in the marketplace, the New York Times sought to reassure genre fanatics that Buck was a “loose, amiable, post‐Civil War Western with a firm though not especially severe Black Conscience. The film is aware of contemporary black issues but its soul is on the plains once ridden by Tom Mix, whom Poitier, astride his galloping horse, his jaw set, somehow resembles in the majestic traveling shots given him by the director.” With music by jazz legend Benny Carter and the most intense harmonica playing you’ve ever heard over opening credits by Sonny Terry. (JA)
102 min • Columbia Pictures • 35mm from Sony Pictures Repertory
Short: Production Featurette for Duel at Diablo (Ralph Nelson, 1966) – 7 min – 16mm

The Auditorium at Northeastern Illinois University – Building E, 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave
General Admission: $7 • NEIU Students: $3

Wednesday, May 9 @ 7:30 PM
MA AND PA KETTLE
Directed by Charles Lamont • 1949
Nearly 50 years before television audiences gathered to have a good collective chuckle at the technologically challenged Ozzy Osbourne trying to work his new TV set on The Osbournes, there was the first Ma and Pa Kettle film, in which a loveable hillbilly family (Ma, Pa, their numerous children and farm animals) living in a dilapidated farmhouse in rural Washington move into a brand-new “house of the future” after Pa wins a slogan-writing contest for a tobacco company. Already on the verge of being evicted from their charming squalor, they move into the modern, mostly automated dream home only to be plagued by its state-of-the-art gadgets. Ma and Pa Kettle (Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride) first graced the screen as supporting characters in The Egg and I playing neighbors to a newlywed couple (Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurrary) trying to make a go at chicken farming. Universal subsequently launched a spin-off franchise of nine films about the Kettle clan that were so popular they helped pull the studio from the brink of bankruptcy. We doubt it will do the same for us, but we promise there will be hijinks, projectiles, and laughs more numerous than the Kettle kids, which is, well … a lot. (RL)
76 min • Universal-International • 35mm from Universal
Cartoon: Porky Pig in “The Swooner Crooner” (Frank Tashlin, 1944) – 7 min – 16mm

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Not a Kettle kid? It’s OK, we’ve got something more your speed coming next week …

The Auditorium at Northeastern Illinois University – Building E, 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave
General Admission: $7 • NEIU Students: $3

Tuesday, May 15 @ 7:30 PM
COOGAN’S BLUFF
Directed by Don Siegel • 1968
Established on the heels of his beloved trilogy of films with Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood’s Malpaso Company provided the auteur-movie star with a space where he could work quickly and efficiently on projects that alternately reinforced and challenged his iconic screen presence. A highly effective action policier typical of early Malpaso product, Coogan’s Bluff was the first film to pair the actor with director Don Siegel, who would go on to direct Clint in four more indelible pictures and who would exert a considerable influence over Eastwood’s own directorial efforts. Eastwood stars as Arizona cowboy cop Walt Coogan, sent to the big city to extradite an acid-gobbling hippie gang leader charged with murder back West. In his quest to bring his man in and bed every woman half his age in New York, Coogan, ever the good libertarian, takes a fast and loose approach to “due process” and manages to alienate just about every person sucked into the chaos that surrounds him. As with any good Eastwood picture, the actor imbues his character with a nasty charm that’s wholly magnetic even as Coogan’s actions often appear far from heroic. Siegel, for his part, further proves his action bonafides with a handful of the greatest helicopter shots ever put to film and an absolute monster of a climatic motorcycle chase. (CW)
93 min. • The Malpaso Company • 35mm from Universal
Short: “The Beguiled: The Storyteller” (Clint Eastwood, 1971) – 12 min – 35mm