Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

Summer Movie Series
Why is the summer box office in the tank? Uh, have you looked at a marquee lately? Even two hours of air-co can't make gritting your teeth through Madagascar seem attractive. The studios have been pelting us with "prestige" releases since early May (have you blocked Kingdom of Heaven from your memory yet?), but it's taken this long to get the region's summer screenings in order, and not a moment too soon.

Claiming bragging rights as the city's oldest outdoor series, the Lawn Chair Drive-In pulls into its new season with Wednesday dusk screenings in Liberty Lands Park (Third and Poplar sts.). In addition to an eclectic slate that runs the gamut from silent comedy to School of Rock, organizer Todd Kimmell has devised theme events to accompany the movies. Sadly, the Night of the Living Dead mystery BBQ has passed us by, but there's plenty of time to brush up on your poppin' and lockin' before the Breakin' dance workshop (July 20), or tune up your Trabant for the vintage car showcase accompanying the Austin Powers inspiration The Tenth Victim (July 27). Each week, Di Pinto Guitars will provide "inexpensive and moderately expensive" ukuleles for an impromptu jam (there are expensive ukuleles?), leading up to the Aug. 3 attempt to set a Guinness record for most instruments accompanying a silent movie. (Purists needn't worry — the record-breaking clamor will only last for the first of the evening's vintage comedy shorts.) Other screenings include: Swing Hostess (June 22), Spice World (June 29), Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris (July 6), Skatetown, U.S.A. (July 13) and Forbidden Planet (Aug. 10).

Secret Cinema returns to 40th Street Field (at Walnut Street) for another run of Thursday nights. From the '20s to the '60s, the Moonlit Movies range from camp obscurities to not-quite-classics, each preceded by an installment of the 1937 serial Radio Patrol. The Deadly Bees (June 30) falls decidedly into the former category, with pop singer Vicki Robbins menaced by yellow-and-black killers, while Arthur Penn's Mickey One (July 7) is an overlooked gem starring Warren Beatty as a Polish nightclub comic on the run from mysterious gangland forces. Penn, who would reteam with Beatty to make Bonnie and Clyde the following year, mixes Nouvelle Vague style and borscht belt cadences to singular effect, creating an existential yarn that's like a showbiz Shadows. Other screenings include: Riffraff (June 16); Douglas Fairbanks' The Pirate (June 23), with live piano accompaniment by Don Kinnier; Frank Capra's Dirigible (July 14); Paradise, Hawaiian Style (July 21) and the Laurel and Hardy classic Sons of the Desert (July 28).

Moving indoors, the County, Ambler and Bryn Mawr theaters' Hollywood Summer Nights series starts a five-week Hitchcock run with the supremely enjoyable North by Northwest on June 20 at the County (each week, 7 p.m. screenings follow at Bryn Mawr on Wednesday and Ambler on Thursday). The Lady Vanishes, Dial M for Murder (in 2-D), Vertigo and Psycho follow at weekly intervals. On July 25, non-Hitch programming resumes with the creepy (intentionally and otherwise) Wait Until Dark, then a trio of comedy classics: Born Yesterday (Aug. 1), Laurel and Hardy's Way Out West (Aug. 8, paired with The Music Box) and Breakfast at Tiffany's (Aug. 15). Then the series goes widescreen with Lawrence of Arabia (Aug. 22) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (Aug. 29). (Sorry, 70 mm fans; 35 only, for Vertigo as well.) Renovations will keep International House closed for much of July, but stay tuned for the July 8 screening of Grand Illusion, a weekend of Susan Sontag's favorites starting July 22, a second edition of The Bike in Film July 29-30, and August's tribute to Sam Peckinpah.

Made in Sheffield
(Tue., June 21, 9 p.m., free, The Khyber, 56 S. Second St.)
Just listen to a string of the songs that came out of Sheffield in the late 1970s and early 1980s — say, The Human League's "Being Boiled," Cabaret Voltaire's "Nag Nag Nag" and Heaven 17's "(We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thing" — and it's obvious there's a story there. Radically different but sharing first principles, the Sheffield bands went after the impact of punk while rejecting its basis in rock (although in the Human League's case, they jumped right over rock to pop when their career stalled). Unfortunately, Eve Wood's borderline-amateurish documentary barely scratches the surface. To her credit, Wood, a first-time filmmaker, tracked down an impressive array of interview subjects, from Human Leaguers to the late John Peel, and doesn't skimp on the lesser-known bands that are the heart of any music scene; The Future, Artery and 2.3 all get equal treatment. (Cab Volt's Richard H. Kirk escaped Wood's grasp, as did anyone from Clock DVA.) The stingy allotment of live footage means that you're left to take others' words for the music's importance rather than experiencing it yourself, and although the musicians are full of good-old-days anecdotes, there's not much discussion of how they actually influenced each other. Newcomers would be better converted by a soundtrack album (only available as a promotional item) or compilation, and aficionados will head for PlexiFilm's DVD, which has more than an hour of extra interviews and a few full-length performances.

Forty Guns/House of Bamboo
($14.98 each DVD)
Samuel Fuller was never one to be restrained by the shackles of genre, but he could play along when it suited him. Although Forty Guns, a Western from 1957, and House of Bamboo, an underworld thriller from 1955, make alterations to their native genres, they can't really be called revisionist, since to Fuller, genres weren't worth revising. Guns, with Barbara Stanwyck as a tough-talking ranch owner who dresses in men's clothing, has superficial similarities to Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar, but where Ray amps up the Western's themes to operatic heights, Fuller brings in themes which are both uniquely his own and faithful to his setting. The romance between Stanwyck and stiff-necked U.S. Marshal Barry Sullivan is unconvincing, as most of Stanwyck's were, but the coldness here seems deliberate: Their major love scene is played in a stable, and instead of billing and cooing, Stanwyck recalls seeing her first dead cattle, learning the difference "between meat and men." By contrast, Fuller gets a substantial erotic charge out of the scene where one of Sullivan's men is fitted for a rifle by a comely young gunsmith; he sights her through the barrel (giving Fuller the chance for an iris-in reminiscent of silent movies), she caresses the blond wood of the stock. The trouble with Forty Guns is that there's not enough such craziness; Fuller keeps coming back to the fairly rote plot in which Stanwyck's hot-headed younger brother causes trouble for Sullivan's lawman, and Sullivan's performance is more lumpish than iconic.

House of Bamboo runs slightly cooler, and is stronger for it. Filmed in Japan, as an opening voiceover and shots of Mount Fuji remind us, the loose remake of Street of No Return finds Robert Stack's Army intelligence officer infiltrating a crime ring headed by genteel but ruthless Robert Ryan. In their informative commentary, noir historians James Ursini and Alain Silver say that Stack was unaware that Fuller intended to portray a homoerotic attraction between the two men, but the cultured Ryan caught on; his is certainly the more nuanced performance, while Stack's intelligence officer seems anything but. As in Forty Guns, the hero is tied down with a heterosexual romance, but here it's perfunctory as well as unconvincing, despite Shirley Yamaguchi's sensitive performance. In the movie's most delirious sequence, Stack starts shaking down the pachinko operators who pay Ryan protection. Two successive encounters progress identically, line-for-line, until Stack gets through a rice-paper screen and finds Ryan and his gang waiting for him. A comment on the repetitions of genre as well as police work, it's a startling moment: Stack might as well have been thrown into the audience. (In its bold theatricality, the scene recalls the films of yakuza filmmaker Seijun Suzuki, who was among several Japanese directors Fuller studied before making his film.) Fuller's oeuvre has been slow to come to DVD, but the release of these two films, particularly with their CinemaScope images properly preserved, is a major step in the right direction.

Misc. Picks The information came in too late to be included with my review, but Hayao Miyazaki fans will thrill to the news that the Ritz is showing Howl's Moving Castle with its original Japanese soundtrack twice daily, alternating with the dubbed Disney version.