Somewhere Between Growing Up and Settling Down: Breaking Away in 35mm This Wednesday

The Portage Theater – 4050 N. Milwaukee Ave – $5.00 per ticket
For the full schedule of classic film screenings at the Portage, please click here.

Wednesday, January 23 @ 7:30pm
BREAKING AWAY
Directed by Peter Yates • 1979
Dennis Christopher, Dennis Quaid, Daniel Stern, and Jackie Earle Haley are four Bloomington townies on the brink of adulthood, adamantly putting off going to college (expensive), joining the army (dangerous), or going to work (i.e., selling used cars). Bitterly opposed to the privileged social elite at Indiana University, Dennis Christopher enters the annual ‘Little Indy’ cycling race as an act of defiance and falls head over heels for IU undergraduate Robyn Douglas, masquerading as an Italian foreign exchange student to win her over. Peter Yates (Bullitt, The Friends of Eddie Coyle) directed an Oscar-winning semi-autobiographical script by Yugoslavian-born Steve Tesich, who moved to Bloomington when he was 13 and won the Little 500 bicycle race of 1962. The film has the kind of sweet, unsentimental outlook that people like Studs Terkel saw in America and, per Time Out-London, “went out of fashion with [Howard] Hawks.” Breaking Away deals with class issues and coming of age in a way that movies no longer think to do (and even in 1979 a film like Breaking Away was an exception to the rule) and in 2013 is just as relevant. (JA)
101 min • 20th Century Fox • 35mm Vault Print from Fox
Serial: Captain Marvel: “Death Takes the Wheel” (John English & William Witney, 1941) – 35mm – 16 min