Thursday, November 12 at 7:00 PM – Music Box Theatre – 3733 N Southport Ave
Tickets: $13 at the door or purchase in advance

BOOM!
Directed by Joseph Losey • 1968
Hollywood’s favorite pair of mismatched lovers, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, made eleven films together, and Boom! counts among the kookiest. In veteran director Joseph Losey’s adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, Taylor plays Flora Goforth, a wealthy, dying woman living in solitude in an island villa. She spends her days on a liquid diet, tossing displeasing items off the nearby cliffs, abusing her staff, and dictating her life story over an intercom system that pumps her memories and madness into every room. When a mysterious visitor (Burton) appears, she becomes convinced he will bring about her demise. Boom! is a feast of exploded art direction, extravagant costumes, and freakish rich-people behavior — it’s as if the Taylor of 1963’s Cleopatra stuffed her best headdresses and jewels into a suitcase and hightailed it to Capri with death hot on her heels. It never, ever lets up, and it’s a joy to behold. A critical and financial failure, the film attracted supporters who were nevertheless a “quality over quantity” bunch. Tennessee Williams himself considered it one of the greatest adaptations of his work, and John Waters called it “the best failed art film ever, so genuinely beautiful and awful that it’s perfect.” The magic of the film even affected Taylor herself, who kept trying to purchase the island villa, only to be told repeatedly that it wasn’t available (because it wasn’t a real house). (RL)
113 min • Universal Pictures • 35mm IB Technicolor print from Universal

Preceded by: Elizabeth Taylor trailer reel – 10 min – 35mm

Introduced by Karina Longworth

Karina Longworth is the writer, creator and host of You Must Remember This, a podcast about 20th Century Hollywood. This screening is connected to the new season of You Must Remember This, called “The Bisexuals”. Launching on September 15, “The Bisexuals,” will cover the life of torch singer — and accused murderess — Libby Holman, and her sexually-fluid group of friends and lovers from the 1920s to the end of the 1960s, which included Montgomery Clift, Tallulah Bankhead, Josephine Baker, Nicholas Ray and many more.

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Friday, November 13 at 7:00 PM – Block Cinema – 40 Arts Circle Drive
Free Admission with RSVP

DREAMS THAT MONEY CAN BUY
Directed by Hans Richter • 1947
Hans Richter had produced some of cinema’s first abstract experiments in Germany in the 1920s, but after the Nazis branded him a “cultural Bolshevik” and destroyed his studio, he fled west and eventually joined a community of expatriate artists and intellectuals in New York. With backing from Peggy Guggenheim, he embarked upon an improbable feature film: a portmanteau of dream episodes suggested by fellow artists Man Ray, Fernand Léger, Max Ernst, Alexander Calder, and Marcel Duchamp. The sequences are strung together with a framing story about Joe, a “self-appointed bum” who pays the rent by setting up a psychoanalytic shingle and exposing his patients’ deepest desires, like a surrealist version of Lucy’s therapy stand in Peanuts. Shot on 16mm Kodachrome, with assistance from Richter’s students at the City College of New York, Dreams That Money Can Buy was produced at a time when the borders between home movies, amateur films, and avant-garde art were porous. Although the first public screenings were ineptly projected on the ceiling, Dreams went on to become an improbable art-house hit in New York, playing for seventeen weeks at the Fifth Avenue Playhouse. Restored with funding from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Celeste Bartos Film Preservation Fund, and The Film Foundation. (KW) 
84 min • Art of This Century Films, Inc. • 16mm from the Museum of Modern Art

Preceded by: “Dreamworks” (Tatsu Aoki, 1983) – 12 min – 16mm from the Chicago Film Society

Preserved by the Chicago Film Society through the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

Introduced by Karina Longworth, writer, creator and host of You Must Remember This.

NEXT UP: Rachel Getting Married on November 18 at the Siskel Film Center