Wednesday, May 14 @ 7:30 PM / NEIU — The Auditorium at NEIU — 3701 W Bryn Mawr Ave
Tickets: $10 at the door
THE BAND WAGON
Directed by Vincente Minnelli • 1953
The classic Hollywood musical has long been a staple of CFS programming, stretching back to our screenings of Beware and The Smiling Lieutenant in our very first season fourteen years ago. Aside from the obvious pleasures of watching charming and attractive movie stars sing, dance, and crack jokes, we love musicals for being quintessentially big-screen film experiences. There are few oeuvres more suited to demonstrating this quality than that of window-dresser turned film director Vincente Minnelli (Meet Me in St. Louis, Yolanda and the Thief). With their evocative color palettes, expressive camera work, and methodical art direction, Minnelli’s musicals of the 1940s and ’50s are among the best arguments we’ve ever encountered for 35mm projection, the format where you can really savor the richness of their details and the saturation of their colors. For sheer, unadulterated joy in cinema, few films by Minnelli (or anybody else for that matter) match The Band Wagon. Fred Astaire stars as Tony Hunter, a waning star of stage and screen who is offered a career lifeline in the form of a new musical comedy, only to be buried under the multiplying, myopically obsessive egomanias of the show’s various cast and crew (punctuated with reliably peppy production numbers, such as “Louisiana Hayride” and the iconic “Triplets”). By midway through reel 5, everything’s pretty much resolved, and for the remainder of the picture we get to simply bask in the sheer joy that comes with putting on a show. That’s Entertainment! (CW)111 min • M-G-M • 35mm from Park Circus, permission Swank
Preceded by: “Field and Scream” (Tex Avery, 1955) – 7 min – 35mm
NEXT UP: A whole new season coming soon…