Author Archives: Northwest Chicago Film Society

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.

Monday, May 27 @ 7:30pm
ALL I DESIRE
Directed by Douglas Sirk • 1953
Barbara Stanwyck returns to Riverdale, Wisconsin, ten years after abandoning her family for a career on the stage. Hoping not to disappoint her daughter Lily (Lori Nelson), who invited her to come see her stage debut in a high school play, Stanwyck convinces her bitter ex-husband (Richard Carlson) and daughter Joyce (Marcia Henderson) that her failed career is a success. Buried love affairs resurface and the whole cast is either emotionally wounded or confused, but the poisonously curious, prying small town is the nastiest character of them all. Bridging a gap between his trilogy of Technicolor Americana musicals and his career-defining melodramas, All I Desire is an honest, forgiving, and sometimes painful examination of small town life at the turn of the century. It’s also melodrama at its most delicious: in a scene only Sirk could have directed, Stanwyck confronts Joyce, who’s never forgiven her for leaving: “We’re a big disappointment to each other, aren’t we? You’ve got a mother with no principles; I’ve got a daughter with no guts.” (JA)
79 min • Universal-International • 35mm from Universal
Preceded by: “Betty Boop’s Prize Show” (Fleischer Studios, 1934) – 16mm – 7 min

————–

Move over, Stanwyck! There’s a new queen of the screen.

Wednesday, May 29 @ 7:30pm
PORTRAIT OF JASON
Directed by Shirley Clarke • 1967
Armed with an Éclair 16mm camera and the most basic sound and lighting equipment, Shirley Clarke and her small crew holed up in her Chelsea Hotel apartment for twelve hours with hustler, cabaret mainstay, and seasoned raconteur Jason Holliday. They emerged with some kind of masterpiece. Before the camera, Holliday (né Aaron Payne of Trenton, New Jersey) spins the most rambunctious autobiography imaginable. Mixing treasured routines, dirty jokes, guilt-free confessions, and bullshit revelations, Holliday lies through his teeth to create the performance of a lifetime. Newly restored by Milestone Films and the Academy Film Archive after an exhaustive search for the best surviving materials and a highly publicized Kickstarter campaign, Portrait of Jason remains an essential document of one queer, black man’s adventures in crazy, pre-Stonewall America. (KW)
Chicago Restoration Premiere co-presented with Reeling and Black Cinema House.
105 min • Filmmakers’ Distribution Center • 35mm from Milestone Films
Preceded by TBA

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, May 22 @ 7:30pm
ZARDOZ
Directed by John Boorman • 1974
The poster promised a mind-blowing, adults-only science fiction experience—Beyond 1984, Beyond 2001, Beyond Love, Beyond Death. Audiences got all that and sinewy Sean Connery in a post-Bond bender, sporting a ponytail and a loincloth as monosyllabic killing machine Zed. Appointed with an endless supply of guns from a talking stone head hovering in the sky, Zed keeps the peace by slaughtering the unwashed hordes—until he learns to read and discovers a world beyond his brutal plain. Skeptically adopted by a commune of entitled immortals led by Charlotte Rampling and Sara Kestelman, Zed single-handedly upends the balance of life on Earth. Gratuitously ridiculed upon its release (in all fairness, the original prints looked like dishwater), Zardoz remains an ambitious and sincere statement from Point Blank director John Boorman—and the final word on the disintegration of Flower Power idealism. (KW)
105 min • 20th Century Fox • 35mm vault print from 20th Century Fox
Preceded by: TBA

———

Whoa, slow down, boy. You’re blowing my mind. Whatever happened to a good, old-fashioned melodrama?

Monday, May 27 @ 7:30pm
ALL I DESIRE
Directed by Douglas Sirk • 1953
Barbara Stanwyck returns to Riverdale, Wisconsin, ten years after abandoning her family for a career on the stage. Hoping not to disappoint her daughter Lily (Lori Nelson), who invited her to come see her stage debut in a high school play, Stanwyck convinces her bitter ex-husband (Richard Carlson) and daughter Joyce (Marcia Henderson) that her failed career is a success. Buried love affairs resurface and the whole cast is either emotionally wounded or confused, but the poisonously curious, prying small town is the nastiest character of them all. Bridging a gap between his trilogy of Technicolor Americana musicals and his career-defining melodramas, All I Desire is an honest, forgiving, and sometimes painful examination of small town life at the turn of the century. It’s also melodrama at its most delicious: in a scene only Sirk could have directed, Stanwyck confronts Joyce, who’s never forgiven her for leaving: “We’re a big disappointment to each other, aren’t we? You’ve got a mother with no principles; I’ve got a daughter with no guts.” (JA)
79 min • Universal-International • 35mm from Universal
Preceded by: “Betty Boop’s Prize Show” (Fleischer Studios, 1934) – 16mm – 7 min

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, May 15 @ 7:30pm
DARK WATERS
Directed by André de Toth • 1944
Oil heiress Merle Oberon survives a Nazi submarine attack, but soon discovers fates worse than death. Oberon journeys to Louisiana to live peaceably at her aunt and uncle’s plantation but winds up menaced by everybody from shady family friend Thomas Mitchell to Cajun overseer Elisha Cook, Jr. (!), all of whom share an uncommon curiosity about the minute details of her trauma. Can recitation and recollection depose reality? Released during the golden age of woman-in-peril thrillers and spiced up with all the standard-issue psychological trimmings, Dark Waters remains an outstanding example of its hazy, semi-feminist subgenre. (With a screenplay by Rebecca and Suspicion scribe Joan Harrison, its pedigree is beyond dispute.) Dark Waters succeeds in large measure because of de Toth’s attention to texture and atmosphere—a studio rendition of Southern Gothic so expert that it managed to fool real bayou dwellers. (KW)
90 min • United Artists • 35mm from private collections
Preceded by: Columbia Comedy Two-Reeler “You Dear Boy” (Jules White, 1943) – 16mm – 16 min

———–

In case you’re entertaining the crazy idea of not attending Zardoz next Wednesday, we present you with this self-explanatory still…

Wednesday, May 22 @ 7:30pm
ZARDOZ
Directed by John Boorman • 1974
The poster promised a mind-blowing, adults-only science fiction experience—Beyond 1984, Beyond 2001, Beyond Love, Beyond Death. Audiences got all that and sinewy Sean Connery in a post-Bond bender, sporting a ponytail and a loincloth as monosyllabic killing machine Zed. Appointed with an endless supply of guns from a talking stone head hovering in the sky, Zed keeps the peace by slaughtering the unwashed hordes—until he learns to read and discovers a world beyond his brutal plain. Skeptically adopted by a commune of entitled immortals led by Charlotte Rampling and Sara Kestelman, Zed single-handedly upends the balance of life on Earth. Gratuitously ridiculed upon its release (in all fairness, the original prints looked like dishwater), Zardoz remains an ambitious and sincere statement from Point Blank director John Boorman—and the final word on the disintegration of Flower Power idealism. (KW)
105 min • 20th Century Fox • 35mm vault print from 20th Century Fox
Preceded by: TBA

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.

Monday, May 13 @ 7:30pm
THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT (LES DEMOISELLES DE ROCHEFORT)
Directed by Jacques Demy • 1967
It’s another summer in the French port city of Rochefort: you can’t walk down the sunny boulevards without bumping into hunky, dancing sailors or poetry-loving traveling carnies. Twin sisters Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac canoodle and caterwaul about the humdrum happenings, longing for the urbane depravity of Paris. Although director and lyricist Jacques Demy takes the Technicolor MGM musicals as his model (the prevailing color scheme might be described as birthday cake pastel), Rochefort is more than a French love letter to American optimism and ingenuity: for Demy, the musical is not so much a genre as a viable template for envisioning and engaging with the world. Featuring a stellar jazz score by Michel Legrand and a supporting cast that includes Danielle Darrieux, Michel Piccoli, Jacques Perrin, George Chakiris, and a spry, Francophone Gene Kelly. (KW)
In French with English subtitles
125 min • Parc Film / Madeleine Films • 35mm from Park Circus
Preceded by: “Umbrella” (Qolga) (Mikheil Kobakhidze, 1967) – 16mm – 20 min

—–

We realize that some of our patrons don’t like feeling elated and effervescent at the movies. Well then, we’ve got just the movie for you, too!

Wednesday, May 15 @ 7:30pm
DARK WATERS
Directed by André de Toth • 1944
Oil heiress Merle Oberon survives a Nazi submarine attack, but soon discovers fates worse than death. Oberon journeys to Louisiana to live peaceably at her aunt and uncle’s plantation but winds up menaced by everybody from shady family friend Thomas Mitchell to Cajun overseer Elisha Cook, Jr. (!), all of whom share an uncommon curiosity about the minute details of her trauma. Can recitation and recollection depose reality? Released during the golden age of woman-in-peril thrillers and spiced up with all the standard-issue psychological trimmings, Dark Waters remains an outstanding example of its hazy, semi-feminist subgenre. (With a screenplay by Rebecca and Suspicion scribe Joan Harrison, its pedigree is beyond dispute.) Dark Waters succeeds in large measure because of de Toth’s attention to texture and atmosphere—a studio rendition of Southern Gothic so expert that it managed to fool real bayou dwellers. (KW)
90 min • United Artists • 35mm from private collections
Preceded by: Columbia Comedy Two-Reeler “You Dear Boy” (Jules White, 1943) – 16mm – 16 min

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, May 8 @ 7:30pm
DELICIOUS
Directed by David Butler • 1931
Most studios responded to the talkie revolution by importing high-class talent from Broadway. Fox, on the other hand, had the chutzpah to put forward its immensely popular silent screen team of Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell (7th Heaven, Street Angel) as the latest light opera sensation. When their bubbly musical debut Sunny Side Up proved a blockbuster, Fox ordered a follow-up and hired no less than George and Ira Gershwin to provide the score—the brothers’ first work for the movies. From this innocuous little story—Scottish immigrant Gaynor meets boy millionaire Farrell in steerage en route to Ellis Island—spring several popular Gershwin standards, including “Blah Blah Blah” and the “Second Rhapsody.” (The latter’s introduced in an extended sequence as Gaynor flees through an expressionist nightmare of Gotham.) An uncommonly optimistic vision of the American melting pot in the depths of the Great Depression—there’s even room for the antics of El Brendel. (KW)
Co-presented with portoluz – Old/New Dreams
106 min • Fox Film Corp. • 35mm from 20th Century Fox
Preceded by: Laurel & Hardy in “Putting Pants on Phillip” (Clyde Bruckman, 1927) – 16mm – 21 min

——-

You don’t like musicals, eh? Any chance our Monday show can convince you otherwise?

Monday, May 13 @ 7:30pm
THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT (LES DEMOISELLES DE ROCHEFORT)
Directed by Jacques Demy • 1967
It’s another summer in the French port city of Rochefort: you can’t walk down the sunny boulevards without bumping into hunky, dancing sailors or poetry-loving traveling carnies. Twin sisters Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac canoodle and caterwaul about the humdrum happenings, longing for the urbane depravity of Paris. Although director and lyricist Jacques Demy takes the Technicolor MGM musicals as his model (the prevailing color scheme might be described as birthday cake pastel), Rochefort is more than a French love letter to American optimism and ingenuity: for Demy, the musical is not so much a genre as a viable template for envisioning and engaging with the world. Featuring a stellar jazz score by Michel Legrand and a supporting cast that includes Danielle Darrieux, Michel Piccoli, Jacques Perrin, George Chakiris, and a spry, Francophone Gene Kelly. (KW)
In French with English subtitles
125 min • Parc Film / Madeleine Films • 35mm from Park Circus
Preceded by: “Umbrella” (Qolga) (Mikheil Kobakhidze, 1967) – 16mm – 20 min

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, May 1 @ 7:30pm
THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE
Directed by John Ford • 1962
Senator Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) returns to the town of Shinbone for the funeral of Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) and recounts the decades-old shooting of outlaw Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) to two local reporters. There’s nothing unusual about the premise: Wayne is an emotionally damaged cowboy, Stewart is morally upstanding but physically weak, Marvin is despicable, the town sheriff is a drunken coward . . . we’ve met all these people before but, seen almost entirely in flashback, these familiar characters take on new life. Wayne and Stewart are clearly older than they’re supposed to be in the story, but that only helps the half-remembered, dreamlike state of the film: darkly lit and with a very sparse set, the film makes the case that it doesn’t really matter whether our past is real or imagined. Ford’s only film in the ’60s shot in black and white, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a film of shadows and light, and more or less the last word on the classic American Western without being a caricature of it. (JA)
123 min • Paramount Pictures • 35mm from Paramount
Preceded by: Will Penny Production Featurette with Charlton Heston (1968) – 16mm Technicolor – 6 min

———

And join us next Wednesday for another delicious confection…

Wednesday, May 8 @ 7:30pm
DELICIOUS
Directed by David Butler • 1931
Most studios responded to the talkie revolution by importing high-class talent from Broadway. Fox, on the other hand, had the chutzpah to put forward its immensely popular silent screen team of Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell (7th Heaven, Street Angel) as the latest light opera sensation. When their bubbly musical debut Sunny Side Up proved a blockbuster, Fox ordered a follow-up and hired no less than George and Ira Gershwin to provide the score—the brothers’ first work for the movies. From this innocuous little story—Scottish immigrant Gaynor meets boy millionaire Farrell in steerage en route to Ellis Island—spring several popular Gershwin standards, including “Blah Blah Blah” and the “Second Rhapsody.” (The latter’s introduced in an extended sequence as Gaynor flees through an expressionist nightmare of Gotham.) An uncommonly optimistic vision of the American melting pot in the depths of the Great Depression—there’s even room for the antics of El Brendel. (KW)
Co-presented with portoluz – Old/New Dreams
106 min • Fox Film Corp. • 35mm from 20th Century Fox
Preceded by: Laurel & Hardy in “Putting Pants on Phillip” (Clyde Bruckman, 1927) – 16mm – 21 min

Wednesday, April 17 @ 7:30pm
THIS ISLAND EARTH
Directed by Joseph M. Newman • 1955
More successfully than any other ’50s science fiction movie, This Island Earth burrows deep inside its pulp source material. You get the sense that every technician at Universal-International was a paperback devotee, devouring boys’ adventure magazines and comics devoted to radios, rockets, and intergalactic conquest with the same alacrity as the kids themselves, fashioning a wondrous Formica-and-steel light show that keeps the spirit of the stuff totally intact. The story itself is pure juvenile urgency: hunky Rex Reason assembles a mysterious telecommunications device as if it were the greatest model train set ever and finds himself invited to hobnob with fellow scientists at a top-secret research facility in Georgia. He and ex-lover Faith Domergue suspect that all is not as it appears, and, insofar as they’re chumps propping up the military-industrial-complex of the distant planet Metaluna, they’re quite right.  Like a free-form Cold War allegory staged with action figures, This Island Earth nevertheless retains, in the words of its most eloquent defender, Raymond Durgnat, “a genuine charge of poetry and of significant social feeling. It’s not cliché; with its sense of inner tensions, of moral tragedy, it’s myth.” (KW)
87 min • Universal-International • 35mm from Universal
Cartoon: “Dancing on the Moon” (Fleischer Color Classic, 1935) – 16mm – 7 min