Music Box Theatre / 3733 N. Southport Ave.
General Admission: $11
Saturday, September 14 @ 11:30 AM
FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE
Directed by Sam Taylor • 1926
Harold Lloyd’s iconic screen persona—the earnest innocent next door, forever striving to make good in a boisterous and vulgar world—gets a hilarious but impolitic update in For Heaven’s Sake. The first of Lloyd’s features to be distributed under a lucrative deal with Paramount, For Heaven’s Sake casually flaunts the comedian’s plenty in the caricatured form of J. Harold Manners, a stuffed-shirt scion who thinks nothing of dropping cash on a new car to match his trousers, nor of walking away from the heap within ten minutes. But soon “the man with a mansion” meets “the miss with a mission,” tossing Jobyna Ralston some scratch after destroying her foursquare father’s coffee cart and inadvertently providing the seed money for a new parish. A relentless comedy that also finds room to shoehorn in born-again hoodlums, speakeasy socialites, and roadside mayhem in a double-decker bus, For Heaven’s Sake remains unjustly obscure, sandwiched between The Freshman and The Kid Brother. A connoisseur’s delight, it was perhaps best summed up by the historian William K. Everson: “Like all Lloyd films, it is constructed rather than written, and assembled rather than directed. But since there is virtually no plot, and the mechanical elements aren’t strained in order to make a plot, it has a grace and fluidity that many Lloyds lack.” (KW)
57 min • Paramount Pictures • 35mm from Harold Lloyd Entertainment
Short: “An Eastern Westerner” (Hal Roach, 1920) – 23 min – 35mm
Live accompaniment by Music Box house organist Dennis Scott
Coming Soon
The Auditorium at Northeastern Illinois University – Building E, 3701 W Bryn Mawr Ave
General Admission: $7 • NEIU Students: $3
Wednesday, September 18 @ 7:30 PM
DRIVE-IN
Directed by Rod Amateau • 1976
What may appear at first glance to be a mere regional American Graffiti impersonator, hoping to nab some leftover dollars from that 1973 cash cow, is, in fact, a little-seen rowdy ode to movies, moviegoers, and small-town Texas weirdos. Directed by the decidedly not-Texan Rod Amateau (also responsible for the pile of gross that is The Garbage Pail Kids Movie) and penned by Bob Peete (known for his writing on “Good Times”), Drive-In is a frenetic mess of characters and plotlines all crashing into one another eventually at The Alamo, a local drive-in screening “Disaster 76” (possibly the greatest action film never made). Energized by a soundtrack of nonstop country hits and swarming with mostly unknown Texan actors – though some may recognize character actors Trey Wilson, Bill McGhee, or future Playboy Bunny Ashley Cox – you may ask after the credits roll, “What actually happened in this film?” The answer is both nothing and everything. Complete with an attempted robbery, a hostage situation, a minor teenage feminist awakening, not one but two vans filled with delinquent teen gang members, and a gasp-inducing scene at the local roller rink, this film, to use the local parlance (as one must), “is busier than a belly dancer with a case of crabs.” (RL)
96 min • Columbia Pictures • 35mm from Sony Pictures Repertory
Short: McQ: A Condensation (Unknown Artist, c. 1974) – 18 min – 35mm
View the full season schedule here!
