Starring: Cher, Karen Black, Kathy Bates, Sandy Dennis
Based on the play by Ed Graczyk (also directed by Robert Altman), Come Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean is an inventive low budget American classic that reveals the hidden secrets, regrets, and obsessions of women who are reunited after twenty years. Centering around their passion for Jimmy Dean, they meet at a Woolworth’s five and dime just down the road from where Giant was filmed as they promised to do decades before. There’s Mona (Sandy Dennis) who claims to have given birth to James Dean’s child after being an extra on Giant, Sissy (Cher in her breakout dramatic performance) who is a snappy waitress unaware of her sex appeal, and Joanne (Karen Black) who has the most shocking revelation of all. Come Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean contains a feminist-driven narrative that addresses patriarchy and the changing dynamic of women’s roles during this time period.
Filmed on Super-16 color and then transferred to 35mm, Come Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean is a theatrical production. The past and present of these women’s lives are represented through the two-way mirror that punctuates the space; one side features them young and naive while the other side shows the present-day unfoldings. This meant that the actors had to precisely navigate that space to render this doubling while viewers must also be agile in processing what happens on screen.
Starring: Gena Rowlands, Peter Falk, Fred Draper
Mabel (Gena Rowlands) is a young wife and mother whose increasing mental illness presents a real challenge to her husband Nick (Peter Falk) and their blue collar Italian family. Her madness is subtle; what first appears simply as eccentric and quirky behavior soon delves into increasingly dangerous situations for Mabel. Revealing the range of emotional bursts, it becomes clear in A Woman Under the Influence that Mabel’s actions are a potential danger to her children and that’s when her husband has to make the difficult decision to have her institutionalized.
As with the majority of Cassavetes films, the improvisational style of acting lends a realistic quality and while the instability of the main character remains steady, this method makes the viewer feel as if the film itself could go anywhere. The performances by Peter Falk and Gena Rowlands are nothing short of electrifying. Rowlands is breathtakingly beautiful even in her most painful episodes while Falk’s loving devotion to his wife, even at her ugliest, is palpable. It is unequivocally one of the greatest romances of modern cinema.
Starring: Moira Shearer, Anton Walbrook, Marius Goring, Robert Helpmann
Containing a story within a story, Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes parallels the ambitions of a young ballerina with the narrative of the ballet she is performing (also called The Red Shoes based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale). Shown in one of the most stunning sequences in cinematic history, the ballet within the film features a young woman purchasing a pair of gleaming red ballet slippers that start her off on a beautiful dance but are ultimately destructive. The dancer, Victoria Page (played by Moira Shearer), also her own demons to confront; does she continue with the passion for her art or cease altogether for the love of a man? In both instances, there is only one way it can end.
Boris Lermontov: Why do you want to dance?
Victoria Page: Why do you want to live?
Boris Lermontov: Well I don’t know exactly why, er, but I must.
Victoria Page: That’s my answer too.
Incorporating a risky material like ballet as the core subject matter and rumored to have gone way over budget, The Red Shoes was met with little fanfare until it debuted in New York and was distributed by Universal. After that, the British audiences got on board and it became one of the highest grossing films in UK history. And with good reason, it’s an artwork unto itself. Painfully beautiful and larger than life, The Red Shoes is a sincere representation of the difficulties one faces when melding art and life together. Pure magic.
In a galaxy very, very, very, very far away there lived a ruthless race of beings known as… SPACEBALLS.
I don’t exercise. If God had wanted me to bend over, he would have put diamonds on the floor. – Joan Rivers
In Mel Brooks’s masterful spoof of Star Wars, the planet Spaceball has run short on breathable air, forcing the evil empire to kidnap prissy Princess Vespa in order to coax her father, King Roland of the planet Druidia, to surrender his planet’s air supply over to them. Roland responds by hiring two down-and-out mercenaries – Lone Starr and Barf, a man-dog hybrid – to rescue the princess, but in order to save the galaxy for good, the team must learn the ancient secrets of The Force. Er…Schwartz. Joan Rivers appears in voice-only as Dot Matrix, the princess’s guardian android and mobile chastity alarm. It’s the perfect role for Rivers, because if she were given the option to be dipped in solid gold and live to crack jokes, she certainly would have taken the plunge. May the Swartz be with you!
Part of Nitehawk’s summer program COMEDIANS IN FILM (Women in Comedy).
A master’s master!
Ricky Jay is a world-renowned magician, author, historian and actor (often a mischievous presence in the films of David Mamet and Paul Thomas Anderson) — and a performer who regularly provokes astonishment from even the most jaded audiences. Deceptive Practice traces Jay’s achievements and influences, from his apprenticeship at age 4 with his grandfather, to such now-forgotten legends as Al Flosso, Slydini, Cardini and his primary mentors, Dai Vernon and Charlie Miller. Featuring rare footage from his 1970s TV appearances (doing 3-card Monte with Steve Martin on The Dinah Shore Show) and told in Jay’s inimitable voice, this is a remarkable journey inside the secretive world of magic and the small circle of eccentrics who are its perpetual devotees.
Q&A with director Neil Berkeley after the Saturday (July 20) screening.
Beauty is Embarrassing takes audiences into the wildly eclectic creative and personal life of artist Wayne White. Before the documentary, Nitehawk’s Artist Film Club presents two TITMOUSE SHORTS.
If you’ve seen Pee Wee’s Playhouse or Smashing Pumpkins’ video Tonight, Tonight or have walked into an art gallery in the past decade, then chances are you’re familiar with Wayne White. Filmed over a period of two years, the Beauty is Embarrassing documentary takes us into the White’s world: from early success to total overload to his relationship with his family to growing up in the south. Always wholly original and driven to create amazing things, Wayne White’s story is one of true inspiration as is evident from the interviews with fellow animators, gallery dealers, art collectors, elementary school teachers, and his wife.
Playing before Beauty is Embarrassing is Nitehawk’s July ARTIST FILM CLUB featuring two animated shorts from Titmouse Animation Studio: Allison Craig’s Barko (2009) and Mike Roush’s The Hidden Life of the Burrowing Owl (2009).
Part of Nitehawk’s Art Seen signature series.
Be the first to see the hour-long premiere episode of The Venture Bros. Season 5 on Nitehawk’s massive silver screen and with stereo sound to boot!
Adult Swim comes to Nitehawk Cinema to screen the Season 4 Finale and the Season 5 Premiere FIVE days before it airs on TV! All attendees will receive a limited edition print but those who arrive early will have the chance to win original animation cels from past seasons of The Venture Bros.
Buying Nitehawk’s $10 food and beverage voucher saves you a seat to watch the premiere.
Spending the night in a haunted mansion with The Cat and the Canary and live music by Guizot, part of Nitehawk’s Live Sound Cinema Vamps and Virgins series.
A staple of the “old dark house” genre films in the 1930s-1950s, Paul Leni’s version of The Cat and the Canary is a blended expression of humor with horror. Annabelle (Laura La Plante) inherits her uncle’s fortune twenty-years after his death but when she and her family spend the night in his haunted mansion, a mysterious figure stalks them. Could it be the escaped asylum lunatic “the Cat” hiding amongst them? La Plante’s virginal Annabelle faces these unseen horrors with only her honor to project her. For the audience, it’s fun watching these shield of virginity battle against the forces of hell…and win!
Providing the live score to The Cat and the Canary is Guizot.
The Cat and the Canary is part of Nitehawk Cinema’s Vamps and Virgins series that explores the two sides of the leading lady spectrum in silent film.
A sales girl who has sex appeal in spades goes after a wealthy playboy in the third of our Live Sound Cinema Vamps and Virgins program – It with a live score performed by djangOrchestra.
In the cinematic silence of the roaring twenties Clara Bow personified the flapper- a modern woman who wanted to be able to drive, drink and stay out all night if she wanted! She’s a flapper, more fun loving and decadent that the vamp who lures men to certain doom. In It, Clara Bow plays a shopgirl who has her eye on the handsome owner of the department store she works in. Clara has ‘It’ and ‘It’ holds the promise of many happy nights and sleep-in mornings in the mind of a weak willed prosperous man. Miss Bow’s tangled sleepy-time hair and fleshy bounce is the epitome of Brooklyn sass, manic Jazz Age energy and guilt-free sex appeal. You will love It.
Mary Alouette (award-winning singer, composer, and bandleader) leads djangOrchesta. Together with her four gypsy jazzmen, she’ll orchestrate hot acoustic jazz guitar and blazing horns in the style of legendary guitarist Django Reinhardt that calls forth a sound that can be described as beautiful music and dangerous rhythm.
It is part of Nitehawk Cinema’s Vamps and Virgins series that explores the two sides of the leading lady spectrum in silent film.
Fritz Lang’s science-fiction masterpiece Metropolis is a Vamps and Virgins Live Sound Cinema event with a live score by Black Lodge.
The utopian society of Metropolis unravels when the son of the city’s main planner realizes there is an entire network of underground workers/slaves. Subsequently, he falls in love with the leader of the underground workers movement in society “Maria” who prophetically claims a savior will come to send the class war. Helm masterfully portrays a double role of “virgin” and “vamp” in Metropolis as the angelic “Maria” who is a prophet/mother to her followers with elements of both the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist. Helm also plays the false Maria, a robot whose role is to destroy Maria’s revolution. The false Maria is nothing less than the “Whore of Babylon”, the apocalyptic figure of Revelation, rousing the workers into acts of violent sabotage.
Providing the live score to Metropolis is Black Lodge.
Metropolis is part of Nitehawk Cinema’s Vamps and Virgins series that explores the two sides of the leading lady spectrum in silent film.
