Screen Picks

Philadelphia Stories (premieres Tue., July 8, 9 p.m., WYBE-TV) WYBE's estimable anthology series returns for a third season, presenting an hour full of local work each Tuesday night, rebroadcast the following Friday at 10. The series kicks off with Cindy Burstein, Tony Heriza and Wendy Univer's Passionate Voices: American Jews and Israel, which uses Philadelphia as the focal point for a study of the often contentious battles between American Jews. Not surprisingly, the protests of the Inquirer's allegedly anti-Israel coverage come center stage, though the filmmakers don't allow the most strident voices to commandeer the dialogue. (They don't shy away from them either: One group of protesters features a young man with a sign that reads, "No Arabs, No War.") A young woman's anti-Palestinian sentiments are contextualized, if not necessarily justified, by the eventual revelation that she wears a bracelet around her wrist with the name of a friend who was killed in a 2001 suicide bombing at a Jerusalem Sbarro. It's impossible to present a "balanced" picture, since the two sides are so unused to talking to each other that the ground for compromise has long grown fallow. But if current events might give reason for the most cautious optimism, Passionate Voices serves as a timely reminder of the profound schisms that will always hide beneath the surface.

Also in the first week's program are Maria Cortese and Upma Singh's oft-screened Child Prodigies: Where Are They Now? and Michael O'Reilly's The Geometry of Grief, which interweaves a variety of imagery and narratives, as well as the stories of 9/11 and the Titanic disaster, all overlaid with O'Reilly's evocative, familiar narration.

Athens, Ga.: Inside/Out (Thu., July 3, 9 p.m., 40th and Walnut sts., free, www.voicenet.com/~jschwart) Secret Cinema kicks off a series of free outdoor movies with a screening of this storied 1987 documentary, which captured the Athens, Ga., music scene at the height of its glory. Featured performers include The B-52's, Pylon, Flat Duo Jets, Dreams So Real and a couple of unforgettable performances by some band called R.E.M. Each week's screening will be preceded by an installment of the 1942 crime serial Gang Busters, with the remaining segments forming part of the Aug. 7 program. Other upcoming screenings: Our Hospitality (July 10, with live musical accompaniment), Wild Guitar (July 17), The Bad Seed (July 24), Johnny Angel (July 31) and The Brute Man (Aug. 7).

Christ in Concrete ($24.99 DVD) Directed by Edward Dmytryk, written by Ben Barzman and starring Sam Wanamaker -- all three victims of the Hollywood blacklist -- this 1949 melodrama is as much a document of the McCarthy era as Salt of the Earth, and a sight easier on the eyes. Though based on Pietro di Donato's novel, Christ in Concrete, the movie was released under the titles Give Us This Day and Salt to the Devil, because having the word "Christ" in the title was considered sacrilegious. (Apparently using the devil's name for entertainment value was okey-dokey.) Though Dmytryk kept di Donato's social realist setting and florid dialogue -- sample uttered at the birth of a baby: "Wail! Wail your one-note opera!" -- the film's style is more noir than neorealist, perhaps a result of the fact that the New York drama had to be filmed on a London soundstage. There's no lack of authenticity in the story, though, a tale of an immigrant bricklayer (heavily based on di Donato's father) whose desperation to earn a house for his newly immigrated bride drives him to ever-riskier pursuits. If the brotherhood-of-the-worker stuff goes on a bit thick ("Hey, let's all work together and split the bonus!"), it's all worth it for the film's coruscating final images, a shocking conclusion that finally makes sense out of that curious title. All Day Entertainment's DVD positively overflows with background material, from audio commentary with Barzman's widow and di Donato's son to DVD-ROM supplements "tracing the development and distribution of the film," not to mention a complete recording of the 1965 "monodrama" adaptation of the novel, an obscure form involving orchestral music and spoken narration (by Eli Wallach).

Hell House ($24.95 DVD) George Ratliff's sobering documentary comes to DVD, including the original short documentary The Devil Made Me Do It and the This American Life segment created from that same footage. Hell House is a portrait of the lengths to which conservative Christians will go to scare people into sharing their beliefs, which in this case means creating an annual house of horrors that dramatizes the ugly fate awaiting teenagers who drink, homosexuals and women who go to raves. (In the latter case, the woman is drugged, raped and eventually commits suicide, then goes to hell, which is about an eyelash away from blaming her for getting raped, but who has time to mince words when you're converting the heathen?) Devil, shot in 1999, profiles the same Texas congregation in the year that their Hell House featured a scene replicating the massacre in Columbine, but the short feels sketchy and unfocused, even despite that gimme of an Exhibit A. Best extra footage: A blushing girl accepts her "Hell House Oscar" for partaking in the rape scene, commenting that she "got to know a lot of great people."

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July 3, 2003
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