Hitchcock, Hawks, Heavies, and "Heavens"
Each Day a Rendezvous With Peril...Each Night a Meeting With Romance!
January 18
Only Angels Have Wings (1939)
Director: Howard Hawks. Writer: Jules Furthman. Composer: Dimitri Tiomkin {Duel in the Sun}
Starring : Cary Grant, Jean Arthur, Rita Hayworth
"Jean Arthur is the odd man out in this high-flying adventure about a group of South American airmail pilots who will stop at nothing to make their company a success….Cary Grant plays the brusque owner/hotshot pilot of the fledgling airline, who refuses to fall in love with Arthur, despite her pretty face and caring personality. The rest of the motley crew is made up of desperate men who only care about one thing – flying. Arthur tries to adopt their devil-may-care attitude in regards to the constant dangers they face while airborne, but she never quite succeeds, leading her to a major life decision. Live without the man she loves while he's alive or stand by his side while he risks his life in the sky. Grant doesn't make it easy for her. Flying is in his soul. She can stay if she wants, but he's never going to stop. There are several subplots involving betrayal, friendship, loyalty, self-sacrifice and lost love. Hawks weaves them all seamlessly into this intense drama about ….[aviators]living on the edge.… The right mix of comedy and adventure keeps this film flying with wit, romance and tragedy. …Hawks makes sure you fall in love with these mugs, guaranteeing your interest from beginning to end. He's one of the few directors adept at both action and comedy, creating some of the most enduring films in either genre.” --CFC. Oscar Nominations for Best Special Effects and Cinematography .
"How do you know what the world is like? Do you know the world
is a foul sty?”
January 25
Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
Director: Alfred Hitchcock. Writer: Thorton Wilder. Composer: Dimitri
Tiomkin {Giant}
Starring: Joseph Cotton, Theresa Wright, Hume Cronyn
"Murder is one of the key ingredients in almost all Hitchcock
films and Shadow Of a Doubt handles it in a taut, complex manner that
ingeniously mixes Capraesque domestic comedy with the harsh realities
of horror. Starring Joseph Cotton as "Uncle Charlie" and
Teresa Wright as his niece, "Young Charlie," the film begins
in Philadelphia where Cotton is suspected of a string of murders dubbed
the "Merry Widow Murders." He shows his craftiness by outsmarting
two detectives… and escapes to the tranquil town of Santa Rosa,
California…..[where he comes to live with] his niece and her
family. Santa Rosa is a utopian town of suburbia tranquility with clean
streets and smiling policemen who direct traffic in orderly fashion.
It is also a place where Wright feels that her family is in a rut;
nothing exciting ever happens here. She comes to the conclusion that
life needs a miracle and decides to call upon her uncle for a visit.
Unknown to her, her uncle is already in route, and is overjoyed that
both she and her "twin" had the same idea. When Cotton arrives,
life is bliss for a short time but when two detectives arrive (posing
as newspaper men doing a piece on the "typical American family")
he realizes that his problems back East have followed him. When Wright
begins to put pieces together regarding her uncle’s strange behavior
around these men, she discovers that the man she worships may indeed
be a deadlier killer. "—Terrence Brady. Oscar nomination
for Best Writing.
"Garbo laughs, a laugh heard round the world, in a joyous and jolly piece of screen entertainment...”
February 1
Ninotchka (1939)
Director: Ernst Lubitsch. Writer: Billy Wilder. Composer: Werner Heymann
{A Night to Remember}
Starring : Greta Garbo, Bela Lugosi, Melvyn
Douglas
"Ninotchka was the long-awaited, classic romantic comedy, with
a clever and witty script and the magnificent presence of actress Greta
Garbo in her first official American comedy…. The charming film
about clashing ideologies (Soviet communism vs. capitalism) begins
with Garbo portrayed at first as a humorless, cold, curt, deadpan,
and seriously-austere Russian envoy (in a parody of her own stiff onscreen
image), who soon melts and is transformed and softened by Parisian
love and a persuasive playboy Count into a frivolous, romantic figure
and converted Communist…Masterfully produced and directed by
Ernst Lubitsch, known for sophisticated, witty, and stylish comedies,
this film was major star Greta Garbo's 26th …[and] last great
film. Few of the easily-recognizable, elegant "Lubitsch touches" are
obvious throughout the film, although the film gracefully and elegantly
presents the romantic love affair between the two lead characters."—Tom
Dirks Oscar nominations for Best Writing, Actress and Picture.
"You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your
lips together and... blow.”
February 8
To Have and Have Not (1944)
Director: Howard Hawks. Writers: Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner.
Composer: Hoagy Carmichael {Stardust}
Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Walter Brennan
"Humphrey Bogart plays Harry Morgan, owner-operator of a charter
boat in wartime Martinique. Morgan’s right-hand man is Eddie,
a garrulous alky whose pet question to anyone and everyone is "Have
you ever been stung by a dead bee?” While in port, Harry is approached
by Free French activist Gerard, who wants to charter Harry’s
boat to smuggle in an important underground leader. Adopting his usual
I-stick-my-neck-out-for-no-one stance, Morgan refuses. Later on, he
starts up a dalliance with Marie Browning (screen newcomer Lauren Bacall),
an attractive pickpocket. In order to help Marie return to America,
Harry agrees to Gerard’s smuggling terms.” –Hal Erickson
"Warmhearted but unsentimental, touching but not mawkish, clever
but never cute, Divan is almost miraculously modest. "—Village
Voice
February 15
Divan (2004) 77 minutes
Director: Peal Gluck.USA / Hungary / Ukraine / Israel, In English,
Hungarian and Yiddish with English subtitles
As a teenager, filmmaker Pearl Gluck and her mother left their Orthodox
Jewish clan in Brooklyn for secular life in Manhattan after her parents’ divorce.
Many years later, Pearl’s father has one wish: that she marry
and return to the community. Pearl, however, takes a more creative
approach to mend the breach. She travels to Hungary to retrieve a turn-of-the-century
family heirloom: a couch upon which esteemed rabbis once slept. En
route for the ancestral divan, Pearl encounters a colorful cast of
characters who provide guidance and inspiration, including a couch
exporter, her ex-Communist cousin in Budapest, a pair of Hungarian-American
matchmakers and a renegade group of formerly ultra-Orthodox Jews. Nimbly
clever and intensely illuminating, DIVAN is a visual parable that offers
the possibility of personal reinvention and cultural re-upholstery. "A
jaunty, insightful and unabashedly self-indulgent reflection on Hasidic
culture and family expectations.” -Jan Stuart, Newday
"What's the matter? You look like you've been on a hayride with
Dracula."
February 22
This Gun for Hire (1942)
Director: Frank Tuttle. Writer: Graham Greene . Composer: David Buttolph
{Rope, House of Wax}
Starring: Veronica Lake, Alan Ladd, Robert Preston
"This Gun For Hire has been described as 'one of the most important early films noir', and one that 'helps to establish a number of conventions of the genre'. The film's enduring significance lies in its influence on a parti
cular subset of classic and post-classic noir films featuring the figure of the lone assassin.... Alan Ladd plays… [Philip]Raven, hired to dispense with a blackmailing industrial chemist in the employ of chemical tycoon, Alvin Brewster…. Ellen Graham ( Veronica Lake) is a thoroughly overdetermined femme fatale who is by turns, [a] devoted fiancee, a nightclub singer and employee of Gates, a US secret agent and Raven's accomplice and 'friend'. She and Raven become increasingly entangled in the Nitro Chemicals political and criminal racket…. In the latter stages of the film, the police track Raven and Graham down in the wonderfully expressive environs of a deserted gasworks at night. Thoroughly apposite given the film's thematic preoccupation with the malevolent potential of industrial development, the gasworks is also a penultimate noir location. Cinematographer John Seitz makes the most of this dramatic backdrop using the enigmatic play of shadows on built form to impressive effect. Raven's descent into the dark interiors and subterranean spaces of the factory metaphorically registers his decline into a desperate and increasingly fragile psychological state. The cavernous spaces of Nitro Chemical's faux Grecian temple headquarters likewise affords an atmospheric noir location in which to emphasise the obscene scale of Brewster's evil empire. Ladd's performance as Raven, his first major role, is generally credited with establishing him as a bona fide Hollywood star. His sculpted features and deadpan persona give his character a glacial appeal, an appeal that as one critic has noted, is precisely mirrored in his co-star Veronica Lake. 'Their unblemished beauty has a manufactured quality; they look like a mogul's idea of what American movie stars should look like...perfect icons, in fact, for the world of forties noir'. The visual contrast of Ladd's dark, brooding impenetrability and Lake's flawless blonde appeal proved to be an audience-winning combination.” --Rose Capp
"From the Moment they met it was Murder!”
March 1
Double Indemnity (1944)
Director: Billy Wilder. Writer: Raymond Chandler. Composer: Miklos
Rozsa {Ben-Hur, Providence}
Starring: Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G Robinson
"Wilder's Double Indemnity was one of the earlier films noir.
The photography by John Seitz helped develop the noir style of sharp-edged
shadows and shots, strange angles and lonely Edward Hopper settings….Double
Indemnity has one of the most familiar noir themes: The hero is not
a criminal, but a weak man who is tempted and succumbs. In this "double''
story, the woman and man tempt one another; neither would have acted
alone. Both are attracted not so much by the crime as by the thrill
of committing it with the other person. Love and money are pretenses.” Roger
Ebert. "Indelible, coal-black noir that any self-respecting studio
wouldn't have the audacity to finance today." -- Jonathan R. Perry.
Received Oscar nominations for Best Writing, Best Sound, Best Music,
Best Cinematography, Best Picture, Best Actress in a Leading Role,
Best Director.
"the slick, rainy-street noir of Chinatown and L.A. Confidential.—Matthew Wilder
March 8
The Glass Key (1942)
Director: Stuart Heisler. Writer: Jonathan Latimer. Composer: Victor
Young {Three Coins in a Fountain, Blue Dahlia} Starring: Veronica Lake,
Alan Ladd, William Bendix
"Jonathon Latimer was one of the pulp authors recruited to replenish
the ranks of Hollywood screenwriters during the Second World War. His
hard-bitten dialogue ("Gimme the roscoe”) is what elevates
this second version of Dashiell Hammet’s novel into a film noir.
And the wildly popular stars, Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd, do justice
to the dialogue. Between them they took the prevalent form of stylized
noir acting to the extreme, developing a peculiarly glacial manner
ideally suited to icy, dark world of noir. Barely emoting or animating
their similarly chiseled Nordic features, they managed to project a
tainted decency beneath their mask-like faces. Lake is no femme fatale.
Although flawed, she’s ultimately the perfect mate for Ladd.
Ladd plays enigmatic Ed Beaumont, loyal right hand man to corrupt politician
Paul Madvig (Brian Donlevy). When Madvig changes allegiance and backs
reform candidate Senator Ralph Henry to get in good with the Senator’s
beautiful daughter ( Lake), his vengeful former criminal associates
frame him for murder. It’s up to Beaumont to clean up the mess.” Calgary
Film Festival
"….suffused with indelible humanist values and emotions."-- David Stratton, Variety
March 15
Since Otar Left (2003)
Director: Julie Bertuccelli. In French, Russian, and Georgian with English subtitles
Winner of the prestigious Critics’ Week Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and featuring a trio of stunning performances, Julie Bertuccelli’s exquisite Since Otar Left is a bittersweet tale of deception and affection. Three Georgian women—strong-willed matriarch Eka , her long-suffering daughter Marina and rebellious granddaughter Ada all live together in their stately-yet-crumbling apartment in contemporary Tbilisi, the capital of the former Soviet republic. Eka pines for her beloved son Otar, a physician who is now a construction worker in Paris. Marina is deeply resentful of her mother’s obsession with her absent brother, while Ada endures their bickering and yearns for a more adventurous existence. When a friend of Otar’s calls with tragic news, Marina and Ada must make a seemingly impossible choice: Do they keep Eka from learning the truth? The Director was a philosophy student before she attended the Ateliers Varan in Paris to study documentary filmmaking. She has worked as an assistant director to such filmmakers as Otar Iosseliani, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Bertrand Tavernier, Emmanuel Finkiel and Rithy Panh. She has directed several documentaries. Depuis qu’Otar est parti is her first fictional feature film. "Almost unbearably moving at times, Julie Betuccelli's simple but sublime debut feature presents a portrait of maternal love and female fortitude that will reduce the stoniest of viewers to tears."-- Frank Scheck, The Hollywood Reporter. Cannes Film Festival , Won, Grand Golden Rail, Julie Bertucelli. César Awards, Won, César , Best First Work. Deauville Film Festival, Won, Best French Script. Viennale 2003, Won, FIPRESCI Prize - Special Mention
"Every shot, every color, every prop, and every costume tells its own story.”—Matthew Kennedy
March 29
All That Heaven Allows (1955)
Director: Douglas Sirk. Art Director: Alexander Golitzen {Touch of Evil} Composer: Frank Skinner {Imitation of Life} *Starring: Jane Wyman, Rock Hudson
"Sirk’s deliriously enjoyable melodrama remains startlingly overt in its critique of America’s bourgeois attitudes during the Eisenhower 1950s. Jane Wyman is Cary Scott, a fortyish widow with two college-age children, Kay and Ned . Some years having elapsed since the death of her businessman husband, Cary now feels ready to spread her wings a little – not easy in a cozy Manhattan-commuter town like Stoningham. While Kay and Ned see ineffectual oldster Harvey as an ideal match for their mother, Cary stuns everyone by embarking on a relationship with free-spirited gardener Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson). Their romance offends local sensibilities not so much because the vigorous Ron is conspicuously younger than Cary, but because he’s perceived as a lower-class manual laborer (he’d been employed to prune her trees) with some dangerously ‘progressive’ ideas. As peer pressure mounts, Cary is faced with an agonising struggle to reconcile her desire for love with the vociferous opposition of her friends and family." --Neil Young. National Film Preservation Board, 1995, National Film Registry.
**** Four Stars from the Christian Science Monitor
April 5
Juliet of the Spirits (1965)
Director: Frederico Fellini. Cinematographer: Gianni Di Venanzo {8 ½}.
Composer: Nino Rota {War and Peace} Starring Giulietta Masina, Giulietta
Boldrini, Mario Pisu
"Made in 1965, around the time the term psychedelia was coined
to describe a luminous Day-Glo vision of the world, Federico Fellini's
phantasmagoric Juliet of the Spirits was the Italian master's first
color film. Fellini went deliriously and brilliantly bananas with the
color to create a rollicking through-the-looking-glass series of tableaus
evoking a woman's troubled psyche. These sequences are a zany, surreal
jumble of Freudian, Jungian and pagan symbolism segued into a 145-minute
head trip.” -- Stephen Holden , The New York Times. A mad, resplendent
peacock of a film, a cinematographic riot of color and sensuality that
evokes its era -- the swinging mid-'60s -- as much as any movie made
during those giddy years. Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington:
Academy Awards, Nominated, Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design.
Golden Globes, Won, Best Foreign-Language Foreign Film.
Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists, Won, Silver Ribbon,
Best Cinematography, Best Production Design, Best Supporting Actress
"A Little Knowledge Can be a Dangerous Thing”
April 12
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)
Director: Alfred Hitchcock. Writer: Charles Bennett(The 39 Steps} .
Composer: Bernard Herrmann {The Day the Earth Stood Still}
Starring: Jimmy Stewart, Doris Day, Alan Mowbray
"Alfred Hitchcock's 1956 remake of his own 1934 spy thriller is an exciting event in its own right, with several justifiably famous sequences. James Stewart and Doris Day play American tourists who discover more than they wanted to know about an assassination plot. When their son is kidnapped to keep them quiet, they are caught between concern for him and the terrible secret they hold. When asked about the difference between this version of the story and the one he made 22 years earlier, Hitchcock always said the first was the work of a talented amateur while the second was the act of a seasoned professional. Indeed, several extraordinary moments in this update represent consummate filmmaking, particularly a relentlessly exciting Albert Hall scene, with a blaring symphony, an assassin's gun, and Doris Day's scream. Along with Hitchcock's other films from the mid-1950s to 1960 (including Vertigo, Rear Window, and Psycho), The Man Who Knew Too Much is the work of a master in his prime.” --Tom Keogh. Oscar for Best Song.
"The sum total of all human emotion!"
April 19
Leave Her to Heaven (1945)
Director: John Stahl. Writer: Jo Swerling {Lifeboat}. Composer: Alfred
Newman {Bus Stop, Camelot}
"Gene Tierney makes […Leave Her to Heaven] a rollercoaster
ride of emotional devastation you can't stop watching. Cornel Wilde
plays the writer of her dreams, a man she loves way too much. Her seductive,
mysterious beauty draws him into her web of lies and deception from
which there is no way out. He initially finds her desperate need to
have him all to herself adorable, but when this exclusion includes
members of their immediate family, he begins to feel the noose tighten.
On the surface her actions appear to be loving and decent, but they
conceal a cold, bitter heart and a mind constantly working any angle
to keep them together. Those that don't go along with her plans are
taken out of the game for good. When she realizes her husband is in
love with her adopted sister , she sets her final plan in motion. She'd
rather die than lose him and she'll be damned if they're going to live
happily ever after. Once you've committed several murders, a little
perjury isn't going to weigh too heavily on your soul. This is …a
taut thriller that works like gangbusters because of the stunning performances
of Tierney and Jeanne Crain. Both are intelligent, beautiful and strong
women. The former just turns her passion into an all-encompassing stranglehold
of obsession. Crain is the only one who stands up to Tierney and you
can feel the sparks of hatred when they share a scene together.”--CFC "The
lush, rhapsodic Technicolor brilliance and hypnotic loveliness of star
Gene Tierney belie the sinister, disturbing tone of Leave Her to Heaven,
a grim tale of manic obsession and depravity."--Luisa Ribeiro
Won, Oscar, Best Cinematography.
Nominated, Oscar, Best Sound, Best Actress in a Leading Role, Best
Art Direction
What lies beneath the surface? What hides behind the walls? What
imprisons desires of the heart?
April 26
Todd Haynes
Far from Heaven (2002)
Director: Todd Haynes. Set Decorator: Ellen Christiansen, {Alfie, Kate and Leopold} . Composer: Elmer Bernstein {To Kill a Mockingbird}
"Sometimes we can see the truth more clearly through the artifice
of fiction, the present more intensely though the prism of the past.
In Todd Haynes' great new movie melodrama Far From Heaven - set in
Hartford, Conn., 1957 - the pristine suburban streets, discreet repressions
and lurid passions may seem far removed from our world today. But Haynes
makes them achingly close. From the moment the camera looks down on
his fictionalized New England "paradise," moving overhead
from a high church steeple through a fiery latticework of autumn leaves,
the movie catches us in a web of silken style, just as it catches its
characters - a repressed housewife (Julianne Moore), a closeted gay
husband (Dennis Quaid) and a black gardener (Dennis Haysbert) - in
devious traps of Eisenhower-era social convention and sexual mores… The
pleasures of "Far From Heaven" are those of a typical humanist-idealist
romance, engaging our emotions on primal gut levels. But they're also
the joys of an almost flawlessly realized objet d'art: a movie where
everything - the gorgeously symbolic production design, Ed Lachman's
glowing cinematography and the movingly evocative period score by that
great, still-vital '50s veteran Elmer Bernstein … work to waft
us back to a recaptured past which now makes perfect sense of an imperfect
world. It's a near-perfect film, too, even if its loves and lies are
written in the wind." Michael Wilmington . Nominated, Oscar ,
Best Music, Best Writing, Best Cinematography, Best Actress in a Leading
Role, Julianne Moore.
Black Reel Awards , Won, Best Supporting Actor, Dennis Haysbert.
Chicago Film Critics Association Awards , Won, Best Picture, Best Original
Score, Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Actress.
Independent Spirit Awards, Won, Independent Spirit Award , Best Director,
Best Cinematography, Best Female Lead, Best Feature, Best Supporting
Male.
New York Film Critics Circle Awards , Won, Best Film, Best Supporting
Actress, Best Director.
The HAR Film Series is Free and Open to the Public.
Call 928-523-9515
for information on films, parking regulations and for copies of this
brochure.
Thanks to: The College of Arts and Letters and Dean Susan Fitzmaurice.
Thanks to the Departments of: English, History, Modern Languages, Philosophy, and Theater; the Schools of Music and Fine Arts; The NAU Art Museum, The Martin-Springer Institute, the Masters of Liberal Studies Program, and the Asian Studies Program.
Thanks to the School of Communication, and the Office of the Associate
Provost for Undergraduate Studies.
Thanks to Cline Library: Cynthia Childrey, Claudia Bakula, Kathleen
Smalldon, Beth Schuck, Joyce Read, Bahe Katenay, Stephanie Keys, Nancy
Pitz, Delia Munoz, Charleene Fell and Ruth Roazen and the rest of the
Cline Library Staff.
Special thanks to the School of Communication and Paul Helford.
Special thanks to the Coconino High School Film Society, Molly Munger,
Appliance Service Today and the Wilmot Family
Special thanks to KNAU
Special thanks to Rebecca Wright and the Humanities, Arts, and Religion staff.