Starring: Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Billy Chapin, Sally Jane Bruce, Peter Graves
An initially overlooked film that’s now considered a classic, The Night of the Hunter is a tightly composed tale of “good versus evil” told through innocent farm kids and the sociopath preacher who is stalking them.
Bringing Davis Grubb’s novel to the big screen, actor Charles Laughton made his only directorial feature with The Night of the Hunter. All shadows and light, the film is a beautiful juxtaposition of love and hate, quiet moment with bursts of violence, and at its most fundamental, a representation of the struggle between good and evil. And evil enters into the world of a desperate family in the form of the religious fanatic with sociopathic tendencies Harry Powell (played to eery perfection by Robert Mitchum). A serial murderer who marries for money and then kills his brides, he marries a gullible widow (Shelley Winters) for the $10,000 her deceased husband stole. His plan gets complicated when neither of her two children will disclose the whereabouts of the fortune, they head up river to escape the preacher…but he’s always close behind.
The Night of the Hunter is haunting mixture of stark realism and German Expressionism that’s both inspiring and horrifying. Walter Schumman’s score and the cinematography of Stanley Cortez and fundamental to the feel of the film, which is one of a poetic struggle.
Part of the VICE Presents: The Film Foundation Screening Series at Nitehawk Cinema. Two for the Road is a late 1960s British comedy/drama that tracks the winding road of life taken by a couple through their decade-long marriage. Includes a recorded introduction by Schawn Belston from Fox who restored Two for the Road.
While very literally set amongst the travels of destined couple Joanna and Mark Wallace, Stanley Donen’s Two for the Road is a metaphor for the journey taken by two people who, despite all the trials and triumphs, truly love each other. Through time-shifting vignettes, Two for the Road tracks the ebb and flow of the Wallace’’s ten year marriage: from their mismatched courtship after meeting on a road trip to their subsequent marriage to the birth of their children to the periodic infidelity. The film revels equally in the desire to have a partner in life as much as it does the sheer inevitability of people’s needs shifting over time.
Stanley Donen’s (Singing in the Rain) abandonment of a non-linear narrative troubled people upon release but its influence was not hampered. The scene in which Mark and Joanna first meet (he settles for her after losing out on beautiful music student played by Jacqueline Bisset) inspired the film-within-a-film motif in Francois Truffaut’s Day for Night (1973). But it’s ultimately Two for the Road’s embracement of the problematics of love rather than the unrealistic depictions ubiquitous in cinema that truly makes it an timeless classic. The movie ends ambiguously by showing the beginning of the Wallace’s relationship; perhaps a signifier that real relationships are on a continuous cycle of evolvement.
*A portion of each ticket sale goes towards The Film Foundation. Tickets also include complimentary Larceny Bourbon drinks at an after-party in Nitehawk’s downstairs bar!
TWO FOR THE ROAD (1957, dir. Stanley Donen)
Restored by Twentieth Century Fox in collaboration with The Film Foundation.
Print courtesy of The Film Foundation Conservation Collection at the Academy Film Archive and Twentieth Century Fox.
Part of the VICE Presents: The Film Foundation Screening Series at Nitehawk Cinema. A New Englander heads out the Old West where he becomes involved in a territory dispute involving two hot-tempered families. Recorded intro by Joe Lindner!
Land, family, romance, and violent conflict resolution: these are the essentials for the American country-western genre and they are explored in epic proportions in William Wyler’s The Big County. Including an all-star cast, The Big Country tells of a retired and wealthy sea captain James McKay (Gregory Peck) who arrives in the immensely vast landscape of the west to marry fiancee Pat Terrill (Carroll Baker). His way of life is certainly foreign to those on the ranch which, naturally, extends to the locals such as the cocksure foreman Steve Leech (Charlon Heston) who take a strong dislike to him. In addition to being a fish out of water, he finds his future family-in-law helmed by Major Henry Terrill (Burl Ives) involved in a civil war over water right for their cattle. Although McKay distances himself from the drama at the home of schoolmarm Julia Maragon (Jean Simmons) he finds himself compelled to action when she’s kidnapped over the continuous land wars.
Charlton Heston said, “America was made for Westerns,” and like all good westerns this film confronts the violence and the greed upon which our great nation was formed. Amongst the backdrop of composer Jerome Moross’ score, The Big Country is as big, wide, and colorful as America itself.
*A portion of each ticket sale goes towards The Film Foundation. Tickets also include complimentary Larceny Bourbon drinks at a pre-party in Nitehawk’s downstairs bar starting at 8pm!
THE BIG COUNTRY (1958, dir. William Wyler)
Restored by the Academy Film Archive with funding provided by The Film Foundation.
Print courtesy of The Film Foundation Conservation Collection at the Academy Film Archive and Park Circus Limited.
Starring: Keanu Reeves, Al Pacino, Charlize Theron
Yes, Keanu Reeves is a lawyer. And, yes, Al Pacino is Satan (and a lawyer) in this law firm of the devil movie. Basically, Keanu comes to the Big Apple from Florida with his wholesome wife Charlize Theron in order to become the ruthless and rich lawyer he was destined to become. But things start to get pretty strange when he discovers that his new boss is, you know, actually Lucifer. Pacino is splendid in his over-the-top Satan impression while inciting suicide, sex, and scandal all around him…and then there’s the incest.
Starring: Ellen Burstyn, Linda Blair, Jason Miller, Max Von Sydow
We know this movie now for its parodies and pea soup jokes but even after forty years, William Friedkin’s The Exorcist is one of the scariest movies you’ll ever see. Perhaps it has something to do with the invasion of the devil onto (and into) a young innocent girl and the helplessness that inflicts on everyone involved. Or maybe it’s the enduring battle of two things that still confront the unknowable: science and religion. Whatever fright the context provides, the fear most certainly stems from the innovatively disturbing graphic scenes produced by Friedkin that leave the most lasting impression. It’s the cannon of horror and an essential cinematic Satanic masterpiece. The power of Christ compels you…
Starring: Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon
The year is one! In the film that marked horror as being domesticated, Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby is the quintessential film about the devil. Set in 1960s New York and inside the infamous Dakota (known here as the Bramford), the dollish Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) and the devious Guy Woodhouse (John Cassavetes) battle it out as his desire to be a famous actor means the ultimate pact with Satan…offering his wife up to be the mother of the devil’s only living son.
Rosemary’s obsession with a growing concern for the safety of her baby from neighbors Minnie (oh Ruth Gordon how we love you) and Roman Castevet is validated when she discovers the horrific truth. He does, after all, have his father’s eyes.
Starring: Tom Cruise, Mia Sara, Tim Curry
Legend is a magical adventure that plays on the balance of the universe (good versus evil, life versus death, heaven versus hell). When innocent Princess Lili approaches two of the last unicorns, she inadvertently becomes a pawn for the devil. With their demise, the Lord of Darkness (yay Tim Curry), is able to spread his evil across the land. But another innocent must fight the darkness from descending onto his world and that comes in the form of Tom Cruise as a forest boy (in a role that comes only one year before the release of Top Gun).
Starring: Jocelin Donahue, Tom Noonan, Mary Woronov, Greta Gerwig, AJ Bowen, Dee Wallace
Set in the 1980s and stemming from the fear of the occult and satanic worship during the time, Ti West’s House of the Devil is a slow-burning horror film punctuated with bursts of extreme violence. Low on cash and slightly out of place, Samantha is a college student who reluctantly takes a strange babysitting gig in order to move into her own place. But this job coincides with a rare lunar eclipse that brings forth the devil which means that, instead of watching some kid, she’s the sacrificial lamb (this plays out in scene that mirrors Rosemary’s Baby). Definitely see this one, House of the Devil is one of the better horror movies made in the past decade.
Starring: Barbara Steele, John Richardson, Andrea Checchi
1960 saw the release of three of horror’s best films: Alfred Hitchock’s Psycho, Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, and Mario Bava’s Black Sunday (originally La maschera del demonio or The Mask of Satan). While the others deal with real horrors, Bava’s story is about a vengeful witch whose pact with Satan carries over centuries, long after her execution. In fact, her death is so brutally depicted in the film’s opening sequence that caused the film to be banned in the UK. When she’s awakened by the blood of a traveling doctor, the witch and her minion haunt the cursed family that killed her with the ever-stunning Barbara Steele playing both the witch and the family’s young daughter. As you get with Bava, the film is all contrast, lights and darks, scenery with depth and innovative cinematography.
You’ll really sink your teeth into this tale of a sexy vampire who targets young, rich women in 18th century Germany. This Live Sound Cinema event features a live score by the electronic duo a place both wonderful and strange.
Lush, buxom, and a glorious mix of the Victorian-era meets the 1960s, no one does vampire movies quite like Hammer Films. In Vampire Lovers, the sexy late Ingrid Pitt plays not one but three characters as the lady-leaning vampire who has come to suck the life out of the rich in 18th century Germany. Targeting the bosoms of young and beautiful woman (she only bites men when absolutely necessary), she begins to leave a lot of bodies in her wake. Bring in Peter Cushing as the vampire expect (echoing his Van Helsing roles in the earlier Dracula Hammer Films) to save the town from an undead mess.
a place both wonderful and strange is Russ Marshalek, formerly of Brooklyn’s Lynch-influenced electronic duo Silent Drape Runners. After touring that project across the country for a string of sold out re-soundtracking shows over a year and a half, the duo parted ways, with Marshalek continuing to make smeary, dark Twin Peaks-y electronic dance pop music. Live, a place both wonderful and strange features the post-apocalyptic futurist ingenue Ghost Cop on vocals.
