The Portage Theater – 4050 N. Milwaukee Ave – 7:30 – $5.00 per ticket
For the full schedule of classic film screenings at the Portage, please click here.
February 22
TOO LATE BLUES
Directed by John Cassavetes • 1961
Bobby Darin is straight-laced blues musician John “Ghost” Wakefield; Stella Stevens is the singer who convinces Ghost to leave his band in search of fame (and breaks his heart). This was the first film John Cassavetes directed for a major studio (and his first in 35mm), and his relationship with Paramount was tumultuous (an article in the New York Times suggests that Cassavetes was slated to direct a string of low-budget pictures for the studio that were shelved after the film’s release). The result is a picture about the dangers of selling out that ends up as naïve and sincere as Cassavetes’s appeal in the trailer: “This is a film about people I know,” he says, “the night people, the jazz musicians, the drifters and dreamers, the floaters, the chicks, the smilers, the hangers-on, the phonies, too much sex, not enough love—and they live in a world of too late blues.” (JA)
103 min • Paramount Pictures • 35mm from the Radio Cinema Film Archive
Cartoon: “Little Boy With a Big Horn” (Robert Cannon, 1953) – 35mm
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And coming next week…
February 29
TWENTIETH CENTURY
Directed by Howard Hawks • 1934
Broadway producer John Barrymore brings starlet Carole Lombard into the public eye just as his career hits the skids. They part ways and meet again on board the 20th Century Limited, where he tries desperately to resign Lombard, but the young actress wants nothing to do with it. Thought by Andrew Sarris to be the best film of 1934, and by many to be the best of Hawks’s comedies, the chemistry between Barrymore and Lombard is unmatched. Hawks convinced Barrymore to take the role by billing it as the story of the biggest ham on earth, and John Baxter wrote of Barrymore in Hollywood in the Thirties that “[he] justifies in one role his immense reputation. Cajoling, demanding, even in once scene vamping the harassed Lombard, he projects a perfect image of Broadway panache and insanity.” (JA)
91 min • Columbia Pictures • 35mm from Sony Pictures Repertory
Short: “So You Want a Model Railroad” (1955, Richard L. Bare) – 35mm
