SUNDAY CINEMATHEQUE AT THE CHAZEN: 35MM FOREVER!

DOWNTOWN 81

Spring 2020 programming at the Chazen will again provide due attention to the once standard and now increasingly rarified mode of motion picture exhibition via 35mm film prints. A varied selection of genres from throughout international cinema history will be shown, including newly struck prints of Hollywood studio classics that are part of the UCLA Festival of Preservation on Tour.

  • Sun., Feb. 2 | 2:00 PM
    Chazen

Director Feist delivers a finely paced film noir with all the traditional trappings: An adulterous femme fatale (Wyatt) accidentally kills her estranged husband and sets up a brooding San Francisco cop (Cobb) to take the fall. The traditionally ebullient Wyatt plays against type as the philandering Lois Frazer in a performance bordering on restrained camp. It is, though, the city of San Francisco that takes center stage in this neat little noir potboiler. Six-time Oscar nominated cinematographer Russell Harlan—known for his beautiful epic Western vistas—utilizes dramatic Fort Point at the southern side of the Golden Gate Bridge as the hauntingly eerie location of the film’s exciting climax. Restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive with funding provided by Film Noir Foundation.

  • Sun., Feb. 2 | 3:30 PM
    Chazen

This well-paced noir melodrama from veteran director Fleischer (The Narrow Margin, Violent Saturday) focuses on the Secret Service’s pursuit of counterfeiting mobsters. Trapped is particularly notable for the breakout lead performance of 22-year-old Barbara Payton who was notorious for her brief and tempestuous Hollywood career as well as her tragic and highly publicized death at the age of 39. Cinematographer Guy Roe expertly utilizes light and shadows to highlight the film’s atmospheric and claustrophobic spaces, while visually enhancing the film’s themes of subterfuge and entrapment. The cinematography is particularly effective in the film’s climax that takes place in a Downtown Los Angeles Red Car barn. Restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive with funding provided by Film Noir Foundation.

  • Sun., Feb. 16 | 2:00 PM
    Chazen

Crippled farmer Peter Morgan (Robinson) and his spinster sister Ellen (Anderson) live in seclusion with their adopted teenage ward Meg (Allene Roberts). When Meg’s classmate Nath (Lon McCallister) comes to work the farm, his schoolboy crush on Meg in tow, Pete begins to unravel. He warns of screams in the night and an evil Something that inhabits the Oxhead Woods, centered around an abandoned red cottage and derelict ice house sequestered deep among the trees. Undisclosed sexual and murderous transgressions of the past break through into the present, shattering the carefully crafted veneer of gentility at the Morgan Farm with shame and tragedy. Audiences inured to The Red House via grisly public domain copies will have the scales removed from their eyes by UCLA’s restoration from the original camera negative. Restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive with funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation and The Film Foundation.

  • Sun., Feb. 23 | 2:00 PM
    Chazen

Eddie Rice (Payne), a decorated World War II veteran suffering from amnesia, returns to Los Angeles to find his true identity. Unfortunately, Eddie soon discovers that, as a former gangster, he made many enemies, including his ex-wife Nina (Drew) and mobster Vince (Sonny Tufts). Distinguishing it from other contemporary films whose heroes are returning soldiers with memory loss (The Clay Pigeon, Somewhere in the Night), The Crooked Way is brought to life with some of the most dazzling noir cinematography by Hungarian-born émigré John Alton (T-Men, Border Incident). Combined with Florey's dramatic mise-en-scène and the baroque art direction of Van Nest Polglase (Stranger on the Third Floor, Citizen Kane, All That Money Can Buy), the result is a visually stunning masterpiece. Restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive with funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation and The Film Foundation.

  • Sun., Mar. 1 | 2:00 PM
    Chazen

Filmed in 1981, left incomplete due to money problems, and assembled for release in 2000, Downtown 81 follows rising artist Jean-Michel Basquiat in NYC trying to move a painting while hustling for a place to sleep. Intended as a record of the bombed-out Bohemia of lower Manhattan, this collaboration between Basquiat, Swiss photographer Bertogilo, and writer and Warhol associate Glenn O’Brien became a window on a lost world of life on the margins and crazy creative ferment.

  • Sun., Mar. 8 | 2:00 PM
    Chazen

The gifted director Panahi confronts class divisions within contemporary society through this dark story that begins with a violent jewelry store robbery gone awry. In flashback, the life of the main perpetrator – an overweight Tehran pizza delivery man played by non-professional Emadeddin – is brought out of the shadows. The tense, spare and compassionate screenplay is by the great Abbas Kiarostami. Co-presented with support from UW Middle East Studies.