Author Archives: Northwest Chicago Film Society

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.

May 23
THE CAPTAIN HATES THE SEA
Directed by Lewis Milestone • 1934
Bookended by newspaperman and would-be novelist John Gilbert leaving his girlfriend to get on the San Capador to escape Hollywood and falling back into her arms in New York, the ocean voyage in between coasts is what dreams are made of. The film stars a bond thief (Fred Keating), a detective (Victor McLaglen) who falls for the Keating’s girlfriend (Helen Vinson), the ship’s steward (Leon Errol), an ex-prostitute (Wynne Gibson), an ex-prostitute’s husband (John Wray), The Three Stooges, and the titular Captain (Walter Connolly), a host of others, and somehow it all works. High production costs and – despite an insanely good cast – a lack of big name stars led to a limp-wristed Heaven’s Gate style release from Columbia, and the picture was all but forgotten. But per Otis Ferguson, who championed the film for his entire career, The Captain Hates the Sea was “the best neglected picture in two years … not only a departure from the safe cycles but a picture without a plot, an informal, nonhomey, so-what sort of a picture. Sadder.” The film has been crying for reevaluation ever since. (JA)
93 min • Columbia Pictures • 35mm from Sony Pictures Repertory
Short: Betty Boop in “S.O.S.” (Dave Fleischer, 1932) – 16mm – 7 min

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.

May 16
BOUND FOR GLORY
Directed by Hal Ashby • 1976
A long-gestating adaptation of a decades-old autobiography, Bound for Glory finally brought the life of Woody Guthrie to the screen in the unlikely form of David Carradine, then best known for TV’s Kung Fu. The film focuses on a scant few years in Guthrie’s life, 1936-1940, when the crusading troubadour came to embody a uniquely righteous presence on the American scene. Hopping trains and visiting labor camps, always organizing for some cause or another, often at the expense of his family, Guthrie comes across here as a refreshingly complex, unsanitized figure. More respected than loved upon its release (though Variety unexpectedly celebrated this lefty biopic as an overdue Bicentennial sop from a Hollywood unaccountably allergic to patriot pageants), Bound for Glory now looks both old-fashioned and totally new: the meandering narrative rhythms (an Ashby specialty) and the gorgeous, stately cinematography courtesy of Haskell Wexler mix with the first-ever use of the Steadicam and its roving naturalism in a Hollywood feature. (KW)
Co-presented with portoluz–WPA 2.0: A Brand New Deal
147 min • United Artists • 35mm from Park Circus
Short: “To Hear Your Banjo Play” (Irving Lerner & Willard Van Dyke, 1947) – 16mm – 16 min

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.

May 9
THE FILE ON THELMA JORDON
Directed by Robert Siodmak • 1950
Barbara Stanwyck shows up late one night in the DA’s office to report an attempted burglary and is greeted by the DA’s assistant Wendell Corey, who is completely plastered and offers to fix a parking ticket for her if she’ll join him for a drink. Corey’s wife and children are away on their summer vacation and he starts seeing Stanwyck regularly. Things spiral out of control when Corey ends up being the prosecuting attorney in a murder case against Stanwyck, and the two lovers are met with crippling fate. A murky, slow burning star picture, Wendell Corey is an unlikely but excellent match for Stanwyck (he’d do it again the same year in Anthony Mann’s The Furies, also Paramount and a similarly devastating production) in a film that feels like a much more sinister version of Double Indemnity. Time Out noted “[Corey’s] haunted, hangdog persona as a perennial loser is echoed so perfectly well by the deliberately inexorable tempo of Siodmak’s direction … the film emerges with a quality akin to Lang’s dark, romantic despair.” (JA)
100 min • Paramount Pictures • 35mm from Paramount
Cartoon: Tom & Jerry in “The Duck Doctor” (Hanna-Barbera, 1952) – 35mm Technicolor – 7 min

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.

May 2
WILD BOYS OF THE ROAD
Directed by William A. Wellman • 1933
William Wellman’s sleek, gritty melodrama about teenagers faced with the reality that their parents don’t have enough money to feed them stars Frankie Darro and Edwin Phillips as two high school sophomores who leave home in search of work. Train hopping their way through the Midwest, they meet several other orphaned teenagers – among them Dorothy Coonan, who was doing fine until her aunt’s brothel was shut down – and ride from town to town and slum to slum as they are run out by (terrifying) local authorities. Few people worked as efficiently in pre-Code Hollywood as “Wild Bill” Wellman, balancing a strong (yet realistic) social conscience with as much sex, violence, and humility as could fit into a five- or six-reel feature. His work for First National and Warner Brothers in the early ‘30s represents much of what made movies as important as they were during the Depression. (JA)
Co-presented with portoluz–WPA 2.0: A Brand New Deal
68 min • Warner Bros. Pictures • 35mm from the Library of Congress
Short: Our Gang in “Free Wheeling” (Robert McGowan, 1932) – 16mm – 20 min

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.

April 25
THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock • 1955
Shirley MacLaine’s husband Harry is dead, and everyone in town (a retired sea captain, an old maid, and aspiring roadside landscape painter John Forsythe) thinks they did it. Determined to bury their guilty consciences, the bewildered New Englanders each try to dispose of Harry’s corpse before the authorities get involved. The unusually simplistic “Fractured Fairytales” style plot earned the film a gentle pan from critics, but there’s really nothing else like The Trouble With Harry in Hitchcock’s filmography. The result is a film with a morbid tongue in a morbid cheek, all of Hitchcock’s trademark style, and an unexpected kindness and sincerity. Vistavision and Technicolor rarely look as good as they do here with Robert Burks’s location photography and a palette of earthy reds and golds, and MacLaine is uncompromised in her first starring role. The Chicago Sunday Magazine wrote, “The versatility of this auburn topped lass, who looks as though her hair was coiffed with an egg beater, has legs like Dietrich, and can turn on a charm current which leaves males limping has prompted her bosses into bold experiments.” Er, we have trouble imagining a world without her. (JA)
99 min • Paramount Pictures • 35mm from Universal
Short: TBA – 20 min

The Northwest Chicago Film Society is on hiatus until April 25. Why not take the time to look over our new schedule? We think it is has something for everyone–even you! (Still seeing the old schedule after clicking the link? Try refreshing your browser.)

Whether you like hobo operettas, Panchinko scams, Lee Remick, or live rats, you’ll find something in our Popular Front potpourri.

Need your film fix in the meantime? We highly recommend Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars at the Music Box on Thursday, April 19 at 7:30pm.

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And don’t forget our first screening of the new season:

Wednesday, April 25th @ 7:30pm
THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock • 1955
Shirley MacLaine’s husband Harry is dead, and everyone in town (a retired sea captain, an old maid, and aspiring roadside landscape painter John Forsythe) thinks they did it. Determined to bury their guilty consciences, the bewildered New Englanders each try to dispose of Harry’s corpse before the authorities get involved. The unusually simplistic “Fractured Fairytales” style plot earned the film a gentle pan from critics, but there’s really nothing else like The Trouble With Harry in Hitchcock’s filmography. The result is a film with a morbid tongue in a morbid cheek, all of Hitchcock’s trademark style, and an unexpected kindness and sincerity. Vistavision and Technicolor rarely look as good as they do here with Robert Burks’s location photography and a palette of earthy reds and golds, and MacLaine is uncompromised in her first starring role. The Chicago Sunday Magazine wrote, “The versatility of this auburn topped lass, who looks as though her hair was coiffed with an egg beater, has legs like Dietrich, and can turn on a charm current which leaves males limping has prompted her bosses into bold experiments.” Er, we have trouble imagining a world without her. (JA)
99 min • Paramount Pictures • 35mm from Universal
Short: TBA – 20 min

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.

Special Sunday Presentation – Titanic Centennial
April 15
A NIGHT TO REMEMBER
Directed by Roy Ward Baker • 1958
No film record exists of the Titanic’s launch or, needless to say, of its sinking. The 1912 tragedy was instantly, insistently commemorated in popular culture—the ultimate topical subject, with folk songs like “When That Great Ship Went Down” establishing the facts and moral lessons for decades to come. The culture itself recognized a void—a scientific death sentence beyond imagination—and strove to claim it. The 1955 publication of advertising copywriter Walter Lord’s book A Night to Remember set a new standard in popular history, with accounts from over sixty survivors and reams of original research brought to bear upon meticulous documentary reportage. The same factual aesthetic is imported to cinema with notable seriousness-of-purpose in the 1958 version, which plays like a feature-length remembrance. (Might we suggest Paul Greengrass’s United 93 as a modern parallel?) Producer William MacQuitty had witnessed the Titanic’s launch as a boy of six, and A Night to Remember indeed assumes that the audience has considerable personal feelings wrapped up in the event. Though it includes a few composite characters, A Night to Remember recreates the tragedy with uncommon accuracy and vigor; the narrative focus is diffuse and democratic, though quick and moving portraits of second mate Charles Lightoller (Kenneth More) and Titanic designer Thomas Andrews (Michael Goodliffe) emerge. Obviously studied by James Cameron in preparation for his canonical 1997 version, A Night to Remember remains a fitting and moving commemoration of the now century-old event. (RH)
123 min • The Rank Organisation • 35mm from MGM
Short: Original 35mm trailer for Titanic (1997, James Cameron)

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.

April 11
ANGEL
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch • 1937
“You really let all Europe wait just to find out if a woman is a brunette?” Marlene Dietrich, in the final film on her Paramount contract, stars as the continent-hopping wife of statesman Herbert Marshall. Their marriage is contented and unquarrelsome until she spends an afternoon in the Paris salon of a celebrated Russian émigré and falls for Englishman Melvyn Douglas, who knows her only as “Angel.” Torn between an affair with a man she hardly knows and the frustrating status quo with a husband more attentive to Yugoslavia’s problems than her own, Dietrich must improvise a tidy end to an untidy love triangle. Mysteriously neglected, despite Lubitsch, Dietrich, Marshall, and screenwriter Samson Raphaelson all in top form, Angel is a wise and observant film about bedroom diplomacy and the negotiation at the heart of all marriages. (KW)
91 min • Paramount Pictures • 35mm from Universal
Cartoon: Popeye in “For Better or for Worser” (Dave Fleischer, 1935) – 16mm

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Take note: a truly Titanic screening is coming to the Portage this Sunday!

Titanic Centennial
Sunday, April 15 @ 7:30
A NIGHT TO REMEMBER
Directed by Roy Ward Baker • 1958
No film record exists of the Titanic’s launch or, needless to say, of its sinking. The 1912 tragedy was instantly, insistently commemorated in popular culture—the ultimate topical subject, with folk songs like “When That Great Ship Went Down” establishing the facts and moral lessons for decades to come. The culture itself recognized a void—a scientific death sentence beyond imagination—and strove to claim it. The 1955 publication of advertising copywriter Walter Lord’s book A Night to Remember set a new standard in popular history, with accounts from over sixty survivors and reams of original research brought to bear upon meticulous documentary reportage. The same factual aesthetic is imported to cinema with notable seriousness-of-purpose in the 1958 version, which plays like a feature-length remembrance. (Might we suggest Paul Greengrass’s United 93 as a modern parallel?) Producer William MacQuitty had witnessed the Titanic’s launch as a boy of six, and A Night to Remember indeed assumes that the audience has considerable personal feelings wrapped up in the event. Though it includes a few composite characters, A Night to Remember recreates the tragedy with uncommon accuracy and vigor; the narrative focus is diffuse and democratic, though quick and moving portraits of second mate Charles Lightoller (Kenneth More) and Titanic designer Thomas Andrews (Michael Goodliffe) emerge. Obviously studied by James Cameron in preparation for his canonical 1997 version, A Night to Remember remains a fitting and moving commemoration of the now century-old event. (RH)
123 min • The Rank Organisation • 35mm from MGM
Short: Original 35mm trailer for Titanic (1997, James Cameron)

The Portage Theater – 4050 N. Milwaukee Ave – 7:00 – $5.00 per ticket
For the full schedule of classic film screenings at the Portage, please click here.

Special Saturday Presentation
April 7
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
Directed Cecil B. DeMille • 1956
A wonderfully overblown remake of his 1923 film of the same name, Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 The Ten Commandments (in VistaVision, Technicolor, and running nearly four hours long) was also the great director’s swan song to the silver screen (he retired shortly after suffering a heart attack on set atop a 107-foot ladder). DeMille died in 1959, but not before, as Variety put it, “throwing sex and sand at the eyes of his audience for twice as long as anyone in Hollywood had ever dared to.” The Ten Commandments’ merits as a piece of serious filmmaking may occasionally run dry, but nobody before or since has been able to achieve the level of ferocious terror and sensuality in a biblical epic seen here. Immensely popular on its release, it has also been screened on a Saturday in April on ABC since 1973, and re-released several times in 35 and 70mm (the latter billed as the totally bogus Super VistaVision, which cropped the top and bottom of the original negative to accommodate a wider 70mm frame). We’ll be presenting it as it was meant to be seen: in an original IB Technicolor print, with an intermission and DeMille’s impassioned introduction. With Charlton Heston, Yul Brynner, Anne Baxter, Edward G. Robinson, Yvonne De Carlo, Debra Paget, John Derek, Sir Cedric Hardwicke—and Vincent Price! (JA)
220 min, with intermission • Paramount Pictures • 35mm from private collections

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We’ll return to our regular, non-Vistavision programming this Wednesday with Ernst Lubitsch’s rarely screened Angel.

Wednesday, April 11 @ 7:30
ANGEL
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch • 1937
“You really let all Europe wait just to find out if a woman is a brunette?” Marlene Dietrich, in the final film on her Paramount contract, stars as the continent-hopping wife of statesman Herbert Marshall. Their marriage is contented and unquarrelsome until she spends an afternoon in the Paris salon of a celebrated Russian émigré and falls for Englishman Melvyn Douglas, who knows her only as “Angel.” Torn between an affair with a man she hardly knows and the frustrating status quo with a husband more attentive to Yugoslavia’s problems than her own, Dietrich must improvise a tidy end to an untidy love triangle. Mysteriously neglected, despite Lubitsch, Dietrich, Marshall, and screenwriter Samson Raphaelson all in top form, Angel is a wise and observant film about bedroom diplomacy and the negotiation at the heart of all marriages. (KW)
91 min • Paramount Pictures • 35mm from Universal
Cartoon: Popeye in “For Better or for Worser” (Dave Fleischer, 1935) – 16mm

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.

April 4
LIEBELEI
Directed by Max Ophüls • 1933
Vienna, 1900. Love blossoms between young lieutenant Fritz (Wolfgang Liebeneiner) and violinist’s daughter Christine (Magda Schneider), but his past affairs threaten to destroy their union. Significantly anticipating the milieu and atmosphere of Ophüls’s American masterpiece, Letter from an Unknown Woman, Liebelei was the director’s greatest success in his native Germany. By the time it opened in March 1933, Hitler had ascended to power, the distributor had removed the names of both Ophüls and playwright Arthur Schnitzler (both Jews) from the credits, and Ophüls had fled the country, embarking on a fugitive career that never returned to normalcy. He would return to adapting Schnitzler’s work nearly two decades afterwards in La ronde with equally romantic and enchanting results. (KW)
In German with English subtitles
88 min • Elite-Tonfilm-Produktion • 16mm from private collections
Short: “Any Little Girl That’s a Nice Little Girl” (Fleischer Screen Song, 1931) – 16mm

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And don’t forget our about truly epic screening of The Ten Commandments–so epic, in fact, that our regular Wednesday program cannot contain it.

Special Saturday Presentation
Saturday, April 7 @ 7:00
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
Directed Cecil B. DeMille • 1956
A wonderfully overblown remake of his 1923 film of the same name, Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 The Ten Commandments (in VistaVision, Technicolor, and running nearly four hours long) was also the great director’s swan song to the silver screen (he retired shortly after suffering a heart attack on set atop a 107-foot ladder). DeMille died in 1959, but not before, as Variety put it, “throwing sex and sand at the eyes of his audience for twice as long as anyone in Hollywood had ever dared to.” The Ten Commandments’ merits as a piece of serious filmmaking may occasionally run dry, but nobody before or since has been able to achieve the level of ferocious terror and sensuality in a biblical epic seen here. Immensely popular on its release, it has also been screened on a Saturday in April on ABC since 1973, and re-released several times in 35 and 70mm (the latter billed as the totally bogus Super VistaVision, which cropped the top and bottom of the original negative to accommodate a wider 70mm frame). We’ll be presenting it as it was meant to be seen: in an original IB Technicolor print, with an intermission and DeMille’s impassioned introduction. With Charlton Heston, Yul Brynner, Anne Baxter, Edward G. Robinson, Yvonne De Carlo, Debra Paget, John Derek, Sir Cedric Hardwicke—and Vincent Price! (JA)
220 min, with intermission • Paramount Pictures • 35mm from private collections