Sunday, August 24 – Gene Siskel Film Center — 164 N State Street
Tickets: $13 at the door or purchase in advance
2:00 PM
THE DISORDERLY ORDERLY
Directed by Frank Tashlin • 1964
It’s Jerry Lewis and he works in a sanitarium. What more do you need to know? Tashlin, directing the Maestro for the eighth and final time, delivers a blistering cavalcade of visual gags, aural puns, and hospital slapstick, with his signature cartoon-bred flourishes that (arguably) propel Lewis’s manic schticking to the level of High American Pop. The film occasionally explodes with garish chromatic touches as though it’s moonlighting as a test film for the Technicolor process itself. We must also single out for praise the title song, surely one of filmdom’s most bizarre, which is hauntingly crooned over the opening credits by Sammy Davis, Jr. Don’t find a gag funny? Just wait a couple seconds, there’ll be another one along soon. (GW)
90 min • Paramount Pictures • 35mm from private collections, permission Paramount
Introduced by Bob Furmanek, founder of the 3-D Film Archive and Jerry Lewis’s personal archivist from 1984-1994.
4:30 PM
MARY POPPINS
Directed by Robert Stevenson • 1964
Walt Disney spent years trying to convince author P. L. Travers to let him make a film of Mary Poppins, finally securing her permission with the stipulation that she would be a consultant on the production. The result is an astonishing blend of live action, animation, early animatronics, painted backgrounds, and myriad other practical effects. Beloved for its beautiful Sherman Brothers songs, the incredible performances of Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke, and its 14-minute chimney sweep dance sequence, Mary Poppins may also be more timely than ever, a film which advocates for charity, humility, laughter, and common sense in a world which increasingly lacks all of these things. (JA)
139 min • Walt Disney Productions • 35mm from the Chicago Film Society collection at the University of Chicago Film Studies Center, permission Disney
NEXT UP: BLIND HUSBANDS on Sunday, 9/14 at the Music Box