Wednesday, July 6 at 7:30 PM — The Auditorium at NEIU — 3701 W Bryn Mawr Ave
Tickets: $10 at the door

THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN
Directed by Jack Arnold • 1957
One day you’re sunning yourself on the deck of a boat with your beautiful wife, the next day you’re fighting off giant spiders with a sewing pin and hiding in a matchbox. Creature-feature master Jack Arnold’s groundbreaking science fiction classic takes the type of punishment normally reserved for mad scientists and places it squarely on the shoulders of an ordinary man. Grant Williams plays Scott, a nice guy with a nice wife named Louise (Randy Stuart), who lives in a nice house, with a nice cat named Butch (who you may recognize, or not, from Breakfast at Tiffany’s). One day Scott gets randomly gassed by a mysterious passing cloud, and several weeks later he notices his clothes don’t fit so well. A trip to the doctor results in a grim diagnosis, “There’s no medical precedent for what’s happening to you.” Scott is shrinking, and over the course of several months he goes from being a normal guy to living in a dollhouse, cowering from his giant wife (try telling her to grab you a beer now, Scott!), and peddling his sad and unbelievable story to the local media for cash. Don’t worry, it gets much worse–let’s not forget about Butch. Jack Arnold’s influential film would go on to inspire more wonderful shrinking cinema such as Joe Dante’s Innerspace, Joel Schumacher’s The Incredible Shrinking Woman (based on the same Richard Matheson novel), and Joe Johnston’s Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. With the current cinema landscape drowning in mind-numbing CGI, it’s an immeasurable pleasure to view the ingenious, deceptively simple, beautiful optical effects and prop work used to create Scott’s giant new world.  (RL)
81 min • Universal-International • 35mm from Universal
Preceded by: “World of Pets: Cats” (National Geographic Films, 1985) – 16mm from Chicago Film Society collections

Saturday July 9 at 11:30 AM — Music Box Theatre — 3733 N. Southport Ave
Tickets: $12 at the door or purchase in advance

HELL’S HINGES
Directed by Charles Swickard & William S. Hart • 1916
Westerns of the silent era are often regarded as kiddie stuff, generic action pictures with matinee idols in chaps like Tom Mix, Bronco “Billy” Anderson, and Hoot Gibson. Then there are the Westerns of William S. Hart, a middle-aged moralist of the plains whose films reverberate with a dark evangelical awe. Hell’s Hinges is his masterpiece: a fire-and-brimstone sermon on temptation and degeneration that practically demands a denomination all its own. Hart stars as Blaze Tracy, “a man-killer whose philosophy of life is summed up in the creed ‘Shoot first and do your disputin’ later.’” Tracy maintains an alliance of convenience with the proprietor of Silk Miller’s Palace of Joy, a bordello in Hell’s Hinges, “a devil’s den of iniquity that scorched even the sun-patched soil on which it stood.” It’s the kind of town where a preacher might save a few souls, and so an Eastern priest (Jack Standing) and his aptly named sister Faith (Clara Williams) are dispatched to eradicate sin. But even a man of the cloth is no match for a town yearning for a burning, though Tracy’s liquor-fueled Bible study suggests an unlikely path to salvation. Beautifully photographed by Joseph August and sharply constructed by scenarist C. Gardner Sullivan, Hell’s Hinges plays like a religious tract scrawled in blood on the back of a stagecoach handbill. There is, thankfully, nothing else like it in silent cinema. Preserved by The Museum of Modern Art. (KW)
64 min • Triangle Distributing Corporation • 35mm from the Museum of Modern Art
Live musical accompaniment by Dennis Scott
Preceded by: “The Ruse” (William S. Hart, 1915) – 22 min – 16mm