Weekend at BAMcinemaFest

Staycationing cinephiles in the vicinity of the five boroughs are advised to trek over to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where the BAMcinemaFest begins tonight. Propelled by a favorable review in Film Comment I saw the opening film, the British-made Weekend, last week and it's a keeper, a finely wrought gay romance...well, that's limiting. Yes, it's about two men inching their way toward some sort of commitment beyond a one-night stand, and an audience (gay or straight) underserved by the usual cliche-ridden love stories has reason to cheer a more serious one, not that the film lacks humor (or heat). This one digs deeper, and while not a suspense picture per se it builds considerable tension of a kind as the tentative, sort-of out lifeguard Russell (Tom Cullen, below in frame) hooks up with Glen (Chris New), a garrulous, probing artist...on the last weekend before Glen is to leave for Portland for a two-year fellowship. Andrew Haigh's film suggests Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise but the stakes are in their own way more urgent; a subtle sub-theme of the movie is how England's baleful surveillance culture (represented by security cameras around Russell's housing estate) deforms lifestyles, presenting another hurdle for the two very different men to overcome. A stimulating and rewarding start to what promises to be an excellent festival, Weekend is slated for fall release, but the filmmakers are trekking to Brooklyn to screen it...and so might you to see it.

Kaneto Shindo at BAM

In a year marked by too many passings it's nice to report that a great filmmaker, Japan's Kaneto Shindo, will turn 99 next Thursday and has a new film out. And it's even better to report that there's a chance to acquaint yourself with the work of this underacknowledged maverick. Beginning tonight the Brooklyn Academy of Music is hosting a retrospective of his work, which will then tour. I know him from his horror films Kuroneko and the especially the great Onibaba--it was the Criterion disc of that jolting 1964 film (which knocked my movie group for a loop in 1999) that got Benicio Del Toro interested in Shindo, and the actor is the patron of this festival.

A couple of weeks ago I spent the morning at BAM watching two of his films, 1952's Children of Hiroshima, a mournful but clear-eyed reminiscence of the atomic bombing (especially poignant in light of the recent tsunami and subsequent events) and 1960's The Naked Island, an unusual survival story focused on a family of four eking out an existence on a barren outcropping in the sea, filmed so observantly it was mistaken for a documentary by The New York Times. Both are thoroughly gripping; Island, a movie without dialogue, has a stall frame that chilled me to the bone. (Shindo's wife, Noboku Otowa, starred in many of his films, unforgettably in Onibaba and this one, pictured, where having to carry large buckets of water up steep, sunbaked hills many times must have tested the union). A most welcome series that, hot on the heels of BAM's "De Palma Suspense" retro, is making trips to Brooklyn a necessity for cinephiles.

Beasts at BAM

How old does a kid have to be for a dad to take her to a dinosaur movie on the big screen? Older than 20 months, I imagine. So my young-at-heart self will have to sit out the Brooklyn Academy of Music's pocket retrospective dedicated to the work of Brooklyn artist Charles R. Knight, which begins tonight. Knight's murals of prehistoric flora and fauna were a major influence on master animator Ray Harryhausen, as seen in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and One Million Years B.C.; they also gave Harryhausen's mentor, Willis O'Brien, inspiration for The Lost World and King Kong. The latter has a late show on Sunday; maybe I'll check it out (Kong is one of those movies that can be watched annually, as a ritual to cinema greatness). How dino-crazed was I? So much so that I never really cared about Welch in a bikini loincloth when B.C. turned up on ABC's 4:30 Movie.

The full Monty

OK, not a complete retrospective, but tonight BAM kicks off an excellent career overview of Montgomery Clift with The Heiress (1949), one of my favorite films. And the hits featuring the handsome, sensitive, wounded actor keep coming, including Red River (1948), A Place in the Sun (1951), From Here to Eternity (1953, pictured), Wild River (1960), The Misfits (1960), and John Huston's little-seen Freud (1962), his final noteworthy credit. My wife and I looked for his grave within Prospect Park's Friends Quaker Cemetery, a lovely, wild spot that is occasionally open for tours. We didn't find it, but this presentation, not too far away from his final resting place, is apt tribute to a remarkable, influential talent.

Down with 3D surcharges

I saw Alice in Wonderland last night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which now has a 3D screen. I'm hoping they'll find some better use for it other than the mostly dull Alice (retrospective programming perhaps? Would love to see Flesh for Frankenstein in comin' at ya form again). As a BAM member I paid $8 for the film-but there's no break on the $3 rental surcharge on the glasses, the standard price here in New York (I think it was $2 or $2.50 when I saw Avatar in Baltimore).

Off with its head, I say. It's all the same Real 3D process so one size fits all, whether you're seeing Avatar or Alice or Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs or Coraline. And the only movies that really benefit from 3D at all are the ones conceived with the process in mind from the get-go, like Avatar or the surprisingly promising Tron Legacy, due at Christmas. Many of the rest, like Alice and the Clash of the Titans redo, are converted afterwards, for a few unremarkable, fall-down-the-rabbit-hole cheap thrills. Nothing to see here, folks--so why pony up the extra dough? Families coughing up an extra $2 or $3 per member must fume at this something-for-not-much deal. Enough ire from ticket buyers and the 3D "revolution" (already a bit of a snooze) will be stopped dead in its tracks.

I recommend seeing the 2D versions of the non-event ones. Trust me, Alice gains little in the format. Re; 3D, until the studios drop the surcharge (which they'll be loathe to do given the golden eggs it's yielding) the work-around is to hang onto your glasses the next time you see a 3D movie, pay to see a different, surcharge-less movie when it's time to see another, and sneak into the 3D auditorium with your purloined specs. I don't condone this kind of sneaky behavior but the 3D surcharging is a ripoff in any dimension.

Live Design: Tempests of various kinds

The Bridge Project production of The Tempest across the street at BAM, and the gay-themed musical Yank! (pictured), are part of this week's roundup.

Through the looking glass

The harvest moon has yielded a bumper crop of retrospectives.

The Brooklyn Academy of Music has just kicked off a "Hungarians in Hollywood" festival that runs through Oct. 27. Bela Lugosi as Dracula of course but also an eclectic mix of Hungarian hand-crafted entertainment, including Paper Moon, Gilda, and Blow Out.

Love him or hate him, Elia Kazan made some legendary movies, which Film Forum is celebrating with a three-week retrospective that begins tomorrow. Viva Zapata! is hard to find these days, so it's worth checking out. Also highly recommended: The delightful Baby Doll (with one of the best closing lines in film history, Tennessee Williams at his finest) and the more-valued-by-the-year Wild River, which gets a one-week run.

The folks at Subway Cinema have the skinny on the Film Society of Lincoln Center's latest "Scary Movies" fest, which runs Oct. 12-22. I had a great time at the first one some years back. The original, accept-no-substitutes version of The Stepfather (pictured) is in my DVD review queue for Popdose.

Cary Grant at BAM

Just three days left to see him on the big screen, which fit him like a glove. Including a personal favorite from that banner year, Howard Hawks' Only Angels Have Wings (1939). Meanwhile, a nice appreciation of him from The House Next Door.

BAMcinemaFEST kicks off

The Brooklyn Academy of Music is celebrating a decade of film programming with a two-week festival that begins today, including sneak previews of upcoming indies like In the Loop and Humpday, old favorites like The Royal Tenenbaums and Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan (where has she been all my life?), and marathon screenings of...Diana Ross movies? (I don't think I've ever heard her name mentioned in the context of BAM.) The June 27 centerpiece event sounds like a can't miss: Screenings of Metropolis (pictured), accompanied by Irish rock collective 3epkano. The Robot Maria is much more of a BAM denizen.

Late shows

BAM Cinematek has kicked off The Late Film, a series that focuses on onset-of-winter features (not necessarily final productions) of noted auteurs. It got underway with last night's showing of Billy Wilder's mangled 1970 release The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, which came in for additional mauling based on reviews I read this week. It's not at all bad--but it's not all that great, either (though who knows what we're looking at, given all the cuts?), and a lot of the films in the series tend to be middling and sort of interesting, rather than revelatory. That applies to Alfred Hitchcock's uneven Marnie (1964), John Ford's 7 Women (1966), which my film group watched some years back, Michael Powell's Age of Consent (1969), with Helen Mirren in her debut, and Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (pictured, 1999), which I've never really been tempted to revisit. But throwing the occasional spotlight on movies that aren't Psycho, Stagecoach, Black Narcissus, and Dr. Strangelove is why repertory cinema exists, so the series has an intrinsic value. And I saw Robert Altman's The Company (2003) at BAM when it was a new movie, so I feel like I've become part of the repertory experience.

Festival time

The Film Society of Lincoln Center presents its annual Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, from March 5-15. A couple of Fridays ago I spent all day rendez-vousing with the two-part Mesrine, the Che of French gangster pictures, at least in length. Unlike other films at the festival--I've seen several good ones that simply vanished afterwards--Mesrine, starring the excitable Vincent Cassel (pictured in a rare quiet moment), will get a release, in August. One part was enough for me, but it has drive.

BAM salutes, and not for the first time, distributor IFC Films on March 6-12, with a program that includes the Bobby Sands drama Hunger and an intriguing-sounding Korean film, The Chaser. The Italian crime picture Gomorrah , an IFC release, starts a run there on Friday. It's big of BAM to toast IFC when it has its own venue in Manhattan, but it's tough on indies and I guess it's best for everyone to stick together.

BAM gets Right

The excellent Let the Right One In begins a six-day run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music tomorrow. If you see just one Swedish vampire movie this year, do the Right thing, before the proposed US remake spoils it.

Slap Shot at BAM

George Roy Hill's Slap Shot gets the Brooklyn Academy of Music's tribute to Paul Newman on ice tonight. It's a brash, terrifically funny picture, and Newman's profane, not-so-bright portrayal as a coach caught up in hockey's commercialism is one of his best and most underappreciated. A great sports film. Tonight's program also turns the spotlight on Newman's considerably more understated directing career, with a rare showing of his 1972 adaptation of Paul Zindel's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, featuring spouse Joanne Woodward. (As for Hitchcock's Torn Curtain, showing later this week, one or two good scenes does not a good film make, but it's an intriguingly counter-intuitive choice for a tribute, which includes the expected, and welcome, The Hustler, pictured).

Gould standard

A Seventies star turns 70 on Aug. 29. Elliott Gould is starting the celebration early courtesy of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which is hosting a two-week program that takes its title from a Time magazine cover story on the actor, "Star for an Uptight Age." It begins tomorrow with a week of screenings of 1970's M*A*S*H, which, along with 1969's terrific Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (his Oscar nominee, screening Aug. 16) launched the native Brooklynite into stardom.

True confession: I didn't like M*A*S*H at the movies (too self-consciously hipster, overrated) or on TV (too earnest), and I'll be a party pooper next week. But I'll join in, at least in spirit, next Friday, Aug. 8, when Alan Arkin's superb film of Jules Feiffer's Little Murders (1971) screens, with Gould making a Q&A appearance. This is as black as black comedy gets, and the actor's shell-shocked performance sums up the period zeitgeist as a crime-ridden New York crumbles all around him. Gould and M*A*S*H director Robert Altman did much, much better by me with 1973's delightfully unconventional take on Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, The Long Goodbye (pictured), which screens Aug. 9 (again with Gould in attendance) and the gambling comedy-drama California Split (1974), with he and George Segal two peas in a pod, or a blackjack table. (Due to music rights issues the DVD is annoyingly cut, so the big screen is the best place to enjoy the film.)

All of these movies have aged well, and all of them pretty much flopped back in the shag carpet days. (Note to nostalgists: Yes, the Seventies had a lot of exciting films, but then as now it was the dreck that drew audiences. It's just that our dreck has superheroes.) Unlike his contemporary Dustin Hoffman, who bided his time between plum parts, Gould struck while the iron was hot post-M*A*S*H, and struck it again and again till it was ice cold. 1970's Getting Straight, the dead-on-arrival I Love My Wife, and Ingmar Bergman's poorly regarded The Touch (1971) are rarely revived artifacts from a meteoric streak that burned out fast. So was the later Harry and Walter Go to New York (1976), which helped kill off the nostalgia craze ushered in by The Sting and Paper Moon in 1973, but Gould liked playing a larcenous song-and-dance man, so in it is.

1974's Busting (Aug. 10) is a gritty cop buddy picture with Robert Blake. Its director, Peter Hyams, cast Gould as a wearily idealistic journalist caught up in a conspiracy in the excellent Capricorn One (1978), one of the actor's last trademark parts. He's still worked, of course, gaining a new audience via Friends and the Ocean's movies, and a new film, The Caller, with Frank Langella, that looks promising.

There are other, better pictures that BAM might have selected. I would have swapped Harry and Walter with William Friedkin's nimbler The Night They Raided Minsky's. Besides Capricorn One, a superior action movie, there is the nerve-quickening thriller The Silent Partner, where he matches wits with a diabolical Christopher Plummer, and especially Bugsy, where he is in top form as the lummox gangster who friend Warren Beatty has to deal with. But it's his party, and after highs and lows offscreen and all those iconic parts where he never quite got the girl or the version of the American dream his characters had concocted he's earned the right to celebrate it his way.

Uptight with Dassin and Dee

I hadn't seen Jules Dassin's Uptight, until the Brooklyn Academy of Music showed it yesterday afternoon as part of its Afro-Punk Festival. Nor had the rest of the audience. Nor, in fact, had its co-star and co-writer, Ruby Dee, who was present at the screening. She recalled seeing a version of the film, which Paramount let escape at the tail end of turbulent 1968, but not in its final form. "As we were finishing the shoot, Dr. King was assassinated, so Jules took his cameras down to Memphis and Atlanta and incorporated some of that footage into the beginning of the film," Dee said. "We then rewrote and reshot some of the film to reflect what had just happened."

Revisiting Uptight (the title on the print, not Up Tight!, as I have seen it in reference materials) is like opening a time capsule. Some of what's inside has faded away, but much of it has a surprising, close-to-the-ground vitality. Dee and co-star Julian Mayfield, a novelist, playwright, and political activist, knew the black power movement from the inside, and their observations--sharp, hopeful, and critical--shaped Dassin's idea to remake John Ford's 1935 classic The Informer in 60's America. This was Dassin's first U.S. production since 1950's Night and the City; the Communist witch hunts that seized Hollywood sent him into European exile, where after a period of assimilation he made the hits Rififi (1955), Never on Sunday, for which he was nominated for two Oscars in the blacklist-breaking year of 1960, and Topkapi (1964).

Dassin's post-Topkapi features are fairly difficult to see, and the received wisdom is that they aren't worth the effort. But Uptight encourages renewed exploration. It was filmed in Dee's hometown, Cleveland, in the Hough neighborhood, which had experienced racial unrest in July 1966. The shattered city, shot in morose color by the great Boris Kaufman, is as much a seething presence in the picture as New York is in Dassin's Naked City and the London of Night and the City. (With no photos from the film available online, I borrowed this image, taken during the location shoot, from Cleveland.com.) The image, suffused by the jangled soul of Booker T. and the M.G.'s that courses through the soundtrack, has a weary, morning-after texture that fits the aftermath of the assassination.

Dassin begins the picture with stirring footage of King's funeral procession (his casket, carried in a simple farm wagon, was drawn by mules), then cuts to the claustrophobia of the inner city, where revolutionaries sick of the repeated failure of his Gandhian tactics plot revenge. Guns are stolen, a security guard is killed, and agitator Johnny Wells (Max Julien, future star of The Mack) is on the run. Johnny is a friend of Tank (Mayfield), a laid-off steelworker, prone to drink, who is distrusted by most of the slicker, faster-talking rebels, led by the charismatic B.G. (Raymond St. Jacques). Tank, a symbol of black powerlessness and an anachronism in changing times, is pitied by his sometime girlfriend Laurie (Dee), a single mother at loose ends due to money troubles, and swayed by police informant Clarence (Roscoe Lee Browne), who makes no bones about being "a nigger, a stoolpigeon, and a faggot." Spurned by the movement, Tank goes to the police with what he knows about Johnny, setting up a tense shootout and sealing his fate, the only black liberation he is fated to know.

Featuring a host of familiar faces in supporting parts (including Frank Silvera, Janet MacLachlan, Ketty Lester, Dick Anthony Williams, Ji-Tu Cumbuka, and Juanita Moore, kindly reproachful in a key scene) Uptight is a socially conscious neo-noir, a soul brother to Dassin's 40s and 50s pictures. The cast is fine, with Mayfield the reverse image of Richard Widmark's desperate slickster in Night and the City and Browne dignifying a stereotypical part (Dee mentioned that homosexual intellectuals like Clarence were also outcasts from the movement, though the movie segregates him a little too obviously.) Besides its portrait of the black community under siege by poverty and divisiveness the movie also offers Dassin's take on informants (clear-eyed and jaundiced in equal measure) and blacklisting, with a moderate figure (Silvera) warning of camps for dissidents should the revolution explode.

Uptight received sympathetic if unenthusiastic reviews from Vincent Canby and Roger Ebert, and may have felt like salt rubbed into the open wound that was 1968 on its late December release. (Dee says Paramount was apprehensive about the movie, which in its brief release was as successful as Iraq war films are today.) Reviews mention an impatience with its dated, "with it" style, and I braced myself for a full-frontal assault of period camera tricks. But it never really came. The Informer had something of an Expressionist bent, and Uptight some correlative imagery. The credits unfold across an animated segment, a bleed of positive and despairing images etched in by Oscar-winning animators John and Faith Hubley. Death scenes are twinned with similarly spinning camerawork, one which cuts to a turntable in motion, and one sequence is filmed man-on-the-street style. The goofiest segment--where Tank teases caricatured white thrill-seekers in an arcade with a tirade about the forthcoming revolution, a scene shot in distorting funhouse mirrors--was warmly greeted by the audience, perhaps as a stylistic release from the nervous-making handheld and tracking shots prior.

Seeing Uptight after all these decades, in a 40th anniversary year rich with reflection and a new dream for America, proved a fitting epitaph for Dassin and Browne, both recently departed, and a happy ending for the 83-year-old Dee, who said tracking down the film had proved elusive till now (she mentioned another "lost" project, I believe a documentary she had produced about Joe Louis). BAM screens the picture (in an acceptable print) again this Tuesday, July 8, at 4:30pm. My hope for Uptight is that its distributor (or Legend Films, which has been putting some of Paramount's more obscure titles on DVD), will take on its first-ever home video release of Uptight as a not-so-far-in-the-future project.

BAM goes down

The Brooklyn Academy of Music kicks off a salute to indie cinematographer Ed Lachman with a rare showing of the notorious Ken Park this Friday. I saw the undistributed-in-the-U.S. movie at a 2002 Lincoln Center screening, and as you can tell from the poster (which newspaper or magazine had the stones to reprint this?) it flirts with underage pornography, and tips right over with the legal-age castmembers--a lengthy sequence of autoerotic masturbation by one its disaffected male characters "pays off" in more ways than one. Lachman is the co-director, but the real auteur is undoubtedly the button-pushing photographer and filmmaker Larry Clark, whose controversial Kids (1995) and Bully (2001) were mere preludes to this one. (He's been fairly chaste since this one.) I don't want to oversell it, if you're fixing for a sex romp and would rather not go hunting for the Russian-market DVD that's out there; it's an ugly, not particularly arousing picture about ugly, not particularly arousing goings-on among California skateboarders, with occasional bits of beauty (a teen three-way is gorgeously lit). Clark and Lachman will be there for the screening...uncompromising artists or dirty old men? You decide.

Trail of Tears

The Brooklyn Academy of Music is hosting the U.S. theatrical premiere on Wong Kar Wai's debut film As Tears Go By, which opened the year I arrived in the Crown Colony, 1988. Watching it this afternoon took me back. Not the film itself, really--like many of Wong's movies much of it takes place in fairly drab interiors, though it does get outside more than usual. It was the vibe, the thrum of the place back in that bustling, pre-handover era. The highlight is an exciting, kinetically shot foot chase through a hawkers' market that ends on a busy street, a reminder that Wong, who is content with still lifes these days, used to shoot motion pictures. BAM should have double-billed it with the current, narcoleptic My Blueberry Nights for a compare-and-contrast.

In this case, Tears would be the "winner," if you like your movies to be about something other than pretty pictures navel-gazing (and if you must pit them against each other, which I'm not saying you should). But Wong's acolytes tend to dismiss the film, finding it little more than a more stylish gloss on the formulaic, guns-blazing "heroic bloodshed" pictures that were all the rage when I got there. That it is. But it's more than that, too. Borrowing from Mean Streets, it spins a familiar story, of a bad guy trying to reform for love's sake. The charismatic and I think underrated Andy Lau is Wah, a self-confident gangster who is constantly bailing his friend less-stable friend Fly out of trouble. (The film is full of colorful monikers.) Wah's ease is undermined when his hostess girlfriend announces that she's aborted their child; he finds a measure of solace with his newly arrived cousin, Ngor, played by Maggie Cheung (luminous even when fighting off "lung malfunction," treatment for which has brought her to Hong Kong). Fly, portrayed by the showoffy and scenery-chewing Jacky Cheung (Robert De Niro from the Scorsese picture he's not), continues to fly off the handle with the underworld big shots, and which loyalty Wah will choose--to himself and to his relationship with Ngor, or to Fly--is the crux of the picture.

As Tears Go By was shot by Andrew Lau, who as a director later made the hit Infernal Affairs pictures, adapted by Scorsese into The Departed (Alas, his American debut, The Flock, a serial sex cult thriller thing with Richard Gere and Claire Danes as investigators, was reworked by others and is going straight-to-video this month, one of the highest-profile pictures to do so.) Lau's cinematography personifies flash, and there are some nice tricky sequences; the chase, for example, or a distorted, slo-mo confrontation that Wah has with some thugs, one of whom is feeding beer to a cat. Wong might have gone the route of Michael Mann, and the 80s-ish score (including a Cantopop cover of "Take My Breath Away") points the way. The camerawork is at its most searching, however, simply photographing the tight but expressive faces of its two leads, or quietly exploring some of the nooks and crannies of Hong Kong's street life. Of interest to me: When Ngor turns up on Wah's doorstep in Kowloon, I thought she must have come from the mainland. But it's the (then) more provincial Lantau Island, part of Hong Kong and a ferry ride away, yet a culture apart, that she hails from. (I lived in the more suburban and "cosmopolitan" sector of Lantau.)

BAM is showing As Tears Go By through May 8. The print isn't the greatest; Hong Kong, perpetually a culture of the now, hasn't shown much interest in film preservation and restoration, even of its recent past. (There are laudable efforts to correct this, however.) Like the film itself, however, it is good enough--a modest budget and a commensurate film stock may be to blame--and the subtitles are blessedly clean and legible. Maybe Wong, from a loftier but more precarious perch today, should try another exercise in genre and get the lead out of his filmmaking.

Afro-Punk Apes

The cinema side of the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Afro-Punk Festival kicks off tomorrow with a novel choice, 1972's Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, the fourth in the popular Apes series. I first saw it on a "Go Apes!" double feature with the fifth and final entry, Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973). Even as an eight-year-old, I realized that there something deep and disturbing going on beneath Conquest's surface. The Apes films had an interestingly circular structure, the original and Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970) heading inexorably toward a world-ending scenario, with Escape From the Planet of the Apes (1971) cleverly writing itself out of this fail-safe trap by returning lead apes Cornelius (Roddy McDowall) and Zira (Kim Hunter, both terrific under John Chambers' famous makeup) to our own world. That film ends with their deaths--the Apes films were fascinatingly grim for family-sold entertainment. Their son, Caesar (McDowall again), is the focus of Conquest, which is set in a chilly urban environment of the near-future, where docile apes have replaced now-extinct cats and dogs as pets and helpmates for humans.

Caesar, who can talk and reason, but under the tutelage of his human protector Armando (Ricardo Montalban) forces himself to remain silent and obedient, is appalled by the slave-like state of his fellows. In the prior Apes films, the apes were apes, with homo sapiens tendencies and mannerisms. But in Conquest, they are clearly identified with a roiling urban underclass, as the Black Panthers and other protest groups took their campaigns against injustice to the streets. There is very little monkey business in the film, one of the more pensive directed by the declining J. Lee Thompson (The Guns of Navarone and the original Cape Fear); Caesar, who is revealed as the son of the talking apes who were thought to threaten the human status quo in the last film, is tortured by the white fascist overlords. Gaining the upper hand, and leading the other apes in armed revolt, he considers, but refuses to heed, the calm-and-reasoning advice of a black character, a government aide (Hari Rhodes) who is cautiously sympathetic to his cause. The ending is chilling: As the city burns, Caesar, forcefully voiced by McDowall, announces that Earth is now the "planet of the apes." You could hear a pin drop in the theater at that one.

Battle, alas, doesn't follow through on its class and race struggle themes, and is more of a safe kids' film, a retreat from this unexpected rush toward a sociopolitical abyss. Ape-d out, I never watched the short-lived TV show. The less said about Tim Burton's hapless, thoughtless 2001 updating, the better. I'm sure the organizers of the Afro-Punk Festival regard Conquest as camp. But I suspect Caesar will have the last laugh as the film reaches its apocalyptic end.

Assessing Aldrich

I was recently asked to name my favorite film from the last four decades. Ulzana's Raid, Robert Aldrich's should-be-classic Western from 1972, wasn't it. But it was close, from a short list that included Burn! (1969) and Night Moves (1975), and more obvious choices, like Jaws (1975) and Chinatown (1974). (Look for the winner to revealed in fall). "Overlooked Aldrich", a six-film series that begins this Thursday at Brooklyn's BAMcinematek, may help put Ulzana's Raid on more Ten Best lists, or at least reveal a gem hidden for 35 years.

By my reckoning there are three gems in this series, one ringer, and one zircon. You always take the good with the not-so-good, or wrongheaded, with Aldrich, who I have written about before. The maverick filmmaker, whose big hits The Dirty Dozen (1967), The Longest Yard (1974), and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), and influential nightmare noir Kiss Me Deadly (1955), have certainly been looked over, fearlessly tackled controversial themes, but often with a sledgehammer or a blowtorch, where a less blunt instrument would have sufficed. He was wedded to obvious or miscast supporting players, like Ernest Borgnine and the new Ernest Borgnine, Burt Young, and the trite composer Frank De Vol, or just "De Vol"--his score for Ulzana's Raid lets the picture down, and should be erased (disdeVoled?) and replaced should it be reissued on DVD, as with the restored version of Sam Peckipah's Major Dundee. But his best films fascinate, and resonate; Aldrich (1918-1983) grabbed American cinema by the scruff of its neck and forced it, kicking and screaming, into more candid portraits of violence, sexuality, and the national underbelly.

The women's wrestling picture, ...All the Marbles (1981), his last credit, wasn't intended to break ground, and unless it's improved drastically since I last tried to watch it the picture (featuring Vicki Frederick, who had graduated from my dad's Wall Street secretarial pool) can remain overlooked. Better choices might have been one of his two lesser-known films from 1956, the galvanizing war film Attack (some enterprising theater company should considering reviving its source, Norman Brooks' 1954 Broadway play Fragile Fox), and his most sensitive picture, Autumn Leaves, which has a deeply etched portrait of middle-age loneliness from Joan Crawford (it gets a rare showing on Turner Classic Movies on August 3).

Despite a semi-embarrassing script from chest-thumping Oscar winner Steve Shagan (Save The Tiger), I've always liked 1975's Hustle, with Burt Reynolds as an LA cop outraged by Seventies vice and corruption and Catherine Deneuve as his high-class prostitute girlfriend, who would prefer he live and love less fatalistically. Reynolds and Deneuve are cool enough to make their odd casting click but the real heat is supplied by the their co-stars. Eddie Albert, who plays a cringing coward in Attack, contributes a memorably sleazy turn as a lawyer pimp who revels in drugs and teen hookers; the squeakily clean Green Acres star obviously relished getting his freak on with Robert Aldrich. And Ben Johnson and Eileen Brennan are touchingly hardboiled as a married couple gone terribly sour, in a neo-noir enthusiastically, if as usual not altogether tactfully, directed by one of the outstanding veterans of the form.

1961's The Last Sunset was new to me when I caught up with it recently on TCM. Kirk Douglas and Rock Hudson are fairly restrained as adversaries in a convicts-and-cattle drive oater that late in the story brings incest to the surface, as Douglas unwittingly romances the daughter he never knew he had, played by Carol Lynley. Written by Dalton Trumbo, the film spins off in several directions and is never fully satisfactory, but it does indeed fit the bill as overlooked.

Three of Aldrich's four collaborations with Burt Lancaster round out the programming. The first, Apache, can be readily seen on TCM; the second, Vera Cruz (both released in 1954) was a big hit and hardly overlooked, an entertaining good cowboy-bad cowboy pairing for Gary Cooper and Lancaster that builds to a forceful ending. Its mix of established and rising stars in a buddy-type format has been a Hollywood staple ever since.

Lancaster, who was simpatico with the muckraking side of Aldrich's temperament, stars in the two best films in the series. 1977's Twilight's Last Gleaming, Aldrich's last rousing picture, is a taut nuclear thriller with Lancaster as an unbalanced general who seizes a missile silo to force the current occupant of the White House (Charles Durning, more sympathetic than presidential yet appealingly rumpled and human-scaled) to reveal the former administration's misdeeds in Vietnam. Besides an exciting, 24-like unfolding of the central action, via split screens and the like, the movie has an ahead-of-its-time critique of topical policy matters that is more-than-applicable to our current quagmire.

And then there is Ulzana's Raid, the last film to be screened, with Aldrich's daughter Adell in attendance. Its Vietnam parallels are thankfully unstressed, as the film excavates a true-life flashpoint in US/Native American relations, where the calvary sought to rout the bandit leader Ulzana from the warpath and bring him and his followers back to the reservation. Alan Sharp, who later wrote Arthur Penn's excellent Night Moves, contributes a terse, fast-paced, but never overheated script, which is superbly played by Bruce Davison, as a lieutenant entrusted with the ill-starred sortie, and Lancaster simply magnificent as a grizzled army scout. Aldrich said he was dissatisfied with the way the film, turned around quite quickly, came out, but it really gripped my movie-watching group when I showed it in 2001 and it has the stamp of authenticity to it. No longer should it be overlooked.