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JUNE 30/JULY 1 FRI/SAT
(1944) “Memorandum: I killed Dietrichson. Me, Walter Neff, insurance salesman, 35 years old, unmarried, no visible scars. Until a while ago, that is . . . ” Fred MacMurray and icy blonde Barbara Stanwyck team up to wack her husband to the tune of “Tangerine,” despite snooping colleague Edward G. Robinson, in the ne plus ultra of film noir, adapted by Wilder and Raymond Chandler from
the James M. Cain novel. RETURNING SUNDAY & MONDAY, APRIL 20 & 21, 2008
(1959) “You’re a guy. Why should a guy want to marry a
guy?” “Security!” Chicago, 1929, and jazz musicians Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis get a rare look at history in the making: only trouble is, it’s the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, and with kingpin George Raft barking “Get those guys!” to his goon squad, it’s time to don high heels, girdles and falsies to join an all-girl band. But how to keep that darned testosterone in check around sultry
chantootsie Marilyn Monroe? JULY 3 MON
A FOREIGN AFFAIR (1948) As a jeep rolls through the ruins of Berlin, the soundtrack offers “Isn’t it Romantic?” A black-marketeering army captain romances dowdy Congresswoman Jean Arthur while dallying with nightclub-singer-with-a-past Marlene Dietrich, in native Berliner Wilder’s uncompromising satire on the U.S. Occupation. James Agee found it “in rotten taste” — which is how most Wilder films over the next thirty years would be
labeled. JULY 4 TUE (2 FILMS FOR 1 ADMISSION)
BALL OF FIRE (1941, HOWARD HAWKS) Wilder and co-writer Charles Brackett re-visit Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, with a twist: Barbara Stanwyck is a burlesque stripper who hides out in the home of eight unworldly professors — including supersquare
Gary Cooper. THE MAJOR AND THE MINOR (1942) Career girl Ginger Rogers disguises herself as a 12-year-old to beat those hefty train fares, then runs into almost-too-helpful Major Ray Milland. Wilder’s Hollywood directorial debut is a prepubescent Some Like It Hot. With Robert Benchley. “Determinedly
sassy wartime comedy.” – Pauline Kael. JULY 5 WED
THE LOST WEEKEND (1945) “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Failed writer Ray Milland hits the sauce and bottom in Wilder’s first Best Picture Oscar-winner. Famous sequences include the bat and mouse hallucination and a desperate search for a drink on Yom Kippur (filmed on Third Ave. locations). So harrowing that some viewers needed a drink
afterward. JULY 6 THU 
(1957) Agatha Christie courtroom thriller starring Charles Laughton as a crusty barrister defending accused murderer Tyrone Power, who gets no help from wife Marlene Dietrich. With Laughton’s own wife Elsa Lanchester as his unwelcome nurse. JULY 7/8 FRI/SAT
(1950) “I AM big! It’s the pictures that got small!” Luck has run out for William Holden’s hack screenwriter Joe Gillis. (“The poor dope — he always wanted a pool. Well, in the end, he got himself a pool.”) But even from its depths, Gillis recounts his tormented affair as kept man to Gloria Swanson’s has-been silent star Norma Desmond. Perhaps Hollywood’s most scabrous look at itself, but at the same time classic Hollywood in every department. JULY 9 SUN (2 FILMS FOR 1 ADMISSION)
(1955) “When it’s hot like this, you know what I do? I keep my undies in the icebox.” With the dog days already melting the asphalt, Tom Ewell packs the wife and kid off to Maine, while he holds the fort in sweltering NYC. But with the arrival of a new upstairs neighbor — Marilyn Monroe (!) —
it’s time to scratch that itch. (1964) When chronically horny nightclub singer Dean Martin is forced to spend the night at Ray Walston’s home in Climax, Nevada, the psychotically jealous Walston switches his pretty young wife with Kim Novak’s friendly neighborhood hooker Polly the Pistol. Condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency — at best a PG- 13 today. “‘Smarmy’ doesn’t do it justice.” – J. Hoberman, Village
Voice. JULY 10 MON
(1961) When Berlin Coca-Cola rep James Cagney learns the boss’s daughter, airheaded Pamela Tiffin, wants to elope with fanatical Commie Oscar Piffl (Horst Buchholz), it’s time to go into overdrive. Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond’s throwback to 30s pacing, played molto furioso and escalating into Cagney’s machine-gun-fast consumerist aria. “Begins at Mach One and gets somewhere near the speed of light by the time it
finishes.” – The Movie Guide. JULY 11 TUE (2 FILMS FOR 1 ADMISSION)
NINOTCHKA (1939, ERNST LUBITSCH) “Garbo laughs!” Bolshevik “special envoy” Greta Garbo keeps bumbling Paris emissaries Iranoff, Buljanoff and Kopalski sweating borscht — until she discovers the joie du chapeau with Count Melvyn Douglas. Screenplay by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett. “Stalin won’t
like it.” – New York Times. MIDNIGHT (1939, MITCHELL LEISEN) American in Paris Claudette Colbert is so broke she agrees to be hired by aristocrat John Barrymore to dally with the gigolo who’s alienating the affections of wife Mary Astor. With Don Ameche. Script by Wilder and Brackett.
“An American Rules of the Game.” – John Gillett. JULY 12 WED
(1953) William Holden (in an Oscar-winning role) as a cynical hustler suspected of being a German spy in a WWII prisoner-ofwar camp. With Otto Preminger as the commandant who puts
on his boots to answer the phone. JULY 13 THU
(1970) A treasured Wilder project for over a decade. The first film to explore what Holmes & Watson (Robert Stephens & Colin Blakely) were really like, with cases involving Swan Lake, some missing midgets, Queen Victoria and the Loch Ness Monster. JULY 14/15 FRI/SAT
(1951) In Wilder’s most venomous attack on American greed, based on a true story, ruthless reporter Kirk Douglas exploits a doomed man trapped in a cave-in. Jan Sterling on why she isn’t praying for her husband: “Kneeling bags my nylons.” Aka
The Big Carnival. JULY 16 SUN
(1960) Low, low, low-level exec Bud Baxter (Jack Lemmon) trades the key to his Upper West Side pad for the key to the executive washroom — then finds users have been boss Fred MacMurray and his own beloved elevator operator Shirley MacLaine. Wilder won an unprecedented three Oscars: for writing (with I.A.L. Diamond), directing, and producing the year’s Best Picture. JULY 17 MON IRMA LA DOUCE (1963) “This is a story of passion, bloodshed, desire, and death... everything, in fact, that makes life worth living.” Wilder’s biggest hit ever stars Shirley MacLaine as the eponymous Parisian streetwalker, with Jack Lemmon as a naïve
gendarme who becomes her mac. JULY 18 TUE (2 FILMS FOR 1 ADMISSION)
FIVE GRAVES TO CAIRO (1943) National stereotypes run riot as disguised Brit Franchot Tone and French maid Anne Baxter spy on Erich von Stroheim’s Rommel, in Wilder’s remake of the silent Hotel
Imperial. HOLD BACK THE DAWN (1941, MITCHELL LEISEN) In a Sunset Boulevard-like flashback, Rumanian gigolo Charles Boyer cools his heels in a cheap Mexican hotel while waiting for his American visa, then marries naïve schoolteacher Olivia de Havilland to cut his waiting time. Scripted by Brackett and Wilder, who had waited for his own visa in a similar bordertown. With Paulette Goddard. JULY 19 WED
(1954) Awkward chauffeur’s daughter Audrey Hepburn returns from Paris to the Long Island mansion where she grew up, but now she’s très chic, attracting the attentions of playboy William Holden and his stuffed shirt brother Humphrey Bogart. JULY 20 THU 
THE FORTUNE COOKIE (1966) Brother-in-law-from-Hell/shyster lawyer Walter Matthau (in Oscar-winning role) sues an insurance company for a million bucks after a football star flattens cameraman Jack Lemmon. Wilder’s most bitingly cynical movie has been called “uncannily
prophetic of Nixonian America.” |
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SABRINA