Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

Mickey One (Thu., July 7, 9 p.m., free, 40th Street Field, 40th and Walnut sts.) Perhaps the most ambitious of Secret Cinema's outdoor screenings, Arthur Penn's 1965 film ought to have a place in cinema history, if for no other reason than it represents Penn's first venture with Bonnie and Clyde's Warren Beatty. Instead, rarely screened and never released on video, it's been doomed to unfair obscurity. The mix of Nouvelle Vague style and borscht belt dialogue is a rare taste, to be sure: Beatty's Polish emcee might be the first existential nightclub comic. On the run from mysterious gangland forces, he ought to lay low, but the desire to succeed is too strong: He rises to the top, and gets burned. Penn, coming off The Miracle Worker, seemed determined not to make the same mistake. Fired off the Nazi heist thriller The Train (which was completed by John Frankenheimer), Penn attacked the very fabric of moviemaking; with its prismatic chronology and live-wire performances, Mickey One is a showbiz Shadows. Note: If (tut, tut) it looks like rain, SC screenings are rescheduled for Sunday.

Grand Illusion (Fri., July 8, 7 p.m., $5-$6, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542) Celebrating Bastille Day (six days early — don't tell the French), I-House puts up Jean Renoir's 1937 masterpiece Grand Illusion, whose lessons on the degradation of war are sadly ageless. Perhaps the most profound moment comes with the first change of scene — from the inside of a French barracks to the inside of a German one, an equivalency of space matched with evenhanded empathy. Filmed on the eve of the Second World War and set during the First, Grand Illusion showed German soldiers living their lives the same way French ones did, and that for both the goal was more to survive the war than to win it. The story of three French soldiers and their attempts to escape from a German POW camp, Grand Illusion prefigures Stalag 17 with its absurd gallows humor, and also serves, like Visconti's The Leopard, as Renoir's ambivalent elegy for the landed classes — whoever survives the war, nobility is doomed.

Misc. Picks: Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, a Pulitzer-winning examination of the effects of geography and environment on human civilization, gets a three-part PBS-ization, beginning Mon., July 11 at 10 p.m. Vertigo runs through the County, Bryn Mawr and Ambler theaters, starting Mon., July 11.