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.
March 7
GIVE US THIS DAY (CHRIST IN CONCRETE)
Directed by Edward Dmytryk • 1949
Originally pitched as the American debut of director Roberto Rossellini (!), this moving adaptation of Pietro di Donato’s experimental proletarian novel Christ in Concrete was finally made in England’s Denham Studios by top-line talent recently blacklisted in America: actor Sam Wanamaker, screenwriter Ben Barzman, and director Edward Dmytryk. Pressure from the American Legion kept the film from playing more than a handful of engagements, but the show is hardly hardline Communist propaganda. Instead, Give Us This Day simply sketches the nearly insurmountable odds of succeeding in America for bricklayer Geremio (Wanamaker) and his wife Annuziata (Lea Padovani). Their modest dream (a house of their own) is always just out of reach, even when Geremio becomes a foreman and must weigh cost-costing and unsafe work practices against mounting domestic tension. Dour but never less than gripping, the gulf between Give Us This Day and the rest of Dmytryk’s work is skyscraper-sized. Alas, Dmytryk’s subsequent recanting of his hostile HUAC testimony and unforgivable decision to name names has buried this one-of-a-kind experience. (KW)
120 min • Eagle-Lion • 35mm preserved by the Library of Congress
Short: “What’s Your IQ?” (Pete Smith, 1940) – 35mm Technicolor
