Friday, May 1 – The Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts (Film Studies Center) Screening Room 201
– 915 E. 60th St – Free Parking
Tickets: $10 at the door or Purchase in Advance
7:00 PM
HORSE FEATHERS
Directed by Norman Z. McLeod • 1932
Huxley College’s new president is Quincy Adams Wagstaff (Groucho), and his idea of DEI is hiring middle-aged goofballs Baravelli (Chico) and Pinky (Harpo) as ringers to help Huxley’s football team win the big game. An urtext demonstrating how a handful of intuitively linked chaos agents can rearrange reality through wordplay and sheer disrespect, Horse Feathers showcases the Marx Brothers’ unerring instinct for upending institutional gravitas, and has influenced similarly anarchic comedies from Caddyshack to How High. Somehow, this slim film is also roomy enough to contain both the gleefully nihilist anthem “Whatever It Is, I’m Against It” and the genuinely tender trifle “Everyone Says I Love You.” (GW)
68 min • Paramount Pictures • 35mm from Universal
Preceded by: “Guido Deiro, The World’s Foremost Piano-Accordionist” (Doc Saloman, 1929) – 6 min – 35mm preservation print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive
9:00 PM
LADIES MUST LOVE
Directed by E. A. Dupont • 1933
Following the international success of his sordid carnival tale Variety (1925), Berliner Ewald André Dupont went on a globe-trotting tour, making movies in America, Britain, and France. By the early ‘30s, he was back in Germany, making big-budget talkies in multilingual versions for global consumption. His Jewish roots soon necessitated emigrating to America, where the renowned cosmopolitan was assigned B pictures, beginning with this energetic musical comedy, an attempt to cash in on the “gold digger” craze of the moment. Penned by Belvidere, Illinois native William Hurlbut, the story concerns a quartet of desperate gals who form a makeshift covenant, promising that whoever lands a sugar daddy must share her revenue with all four. Jeannie (June Knight) is the first to wrap an affluent stooge around her finger, but complications ensue: she might be (gasp!) falling in love with the mark. Despite a memorable “Tyrolean sequence,” the film didn’t quite catch on; Dupont went on a filmmaking hiatus at the end of the decade, and none of the four leading ladies would make another movie after 1943. (GW)
70 min • Universal Pictures • 35mm from Universal
NEXT UP: Pre-Code Picture Party on Saturday, May 2 at the Logan Center for the Arts