IT WAS a volatile year: divisiveness in America, coupled with strange forms of attraction/repulsion in the world of art, cinema, and the variously freighted forums of what once (quaintly) was called “social discourse.” I trust that all of you who receive this occasional missive covering Midcentury Productions’ ongoing crusade to locate and showcase worthy-but-overlooked past cinema have managed to survive all that—and that you’re hopeful, as I am, that things will be considerably less fraught in 2023.
DESPITE all that, we (is that the “royal we”? Not quite…) made quite a commotion at MCP this past year, even if our great reckonings were confined to a little room. (There are “pockets of hate” for our 2022 home, the Roxie Theater’s screening room, known affectionately—by some—as “the Little,” and not-so-affectionately—by a small but determinedly articulate minority—as “the pit of despair.” The good news is that ‘23 may bring some changes in where we screen our films, which might mollify some of those who seemingly live to complain.)
But back to our big year. My favorite joke in 2022 occurred in November when one of the stalwart attendees of MCP screenings handed me a Post-It note that provided a numerical summary of our efforts in ‘22. “52 films this year!” He smiled a smile that not-so-slowly turned into a smirk. “You’re finally playing with a full deck!”
(I was not quick-witted enough to tell him that we’d decided against going forward with a set of MCP playing cards expressly because we’d expected to hear that joke. Besides, we still have enough promotional items in our back inventory to last for the better part of this decade…)
LET me quickly offer some thoughts about what were arguably the most notable of the films MCP rescued from oblivion during 2022. I’ll do that initially by referencing the thoughts of others; let’s begin with media folk and insiders.
Mick LaSalle was (rightfully) enamored with our two November films in FRENCH ‘22 that showcased Mylene Demongeot, A KISS FOR A KILLER and THAT NIGHT. (Sadly, the luminous Ms. Demongeot passed away just three weeks after we screened these films; we’ll honor her memory again in 2023.)
G. Allen Johnson wrote a tremendous paean to the lead film in our “Japanese women” double feature that was one of the anchoring events of MIDCENTURY MADNESS (our 30-film series that ran in increments from February to September). TEN BLACK WOMEN is a strikingly unique hybrid of black comedy, noir and social commentary that runs rings around the “smart, cynical post-postmodernism” we often endure in present-day cinema. Allen’s tout ensured that every seat in the so-called “pit of despair” (that unjust & unflattering name for the Roxie’s screening room…) was filled.
Meredith Brody not only wrote about us, she also attended our shows, as she’s done since the inception of THE FRENCH HAD A NAME FOR IT in 2014. She was especially taken by our post-WWII German noir double feature, the feverish EPILOG and the tense MANY PASSED BY, the former showcasing a director (Helmut Kautner) who deserves an American “auteurist” retrospective of the type rarely done anymore (I still wistfully recall these, particularly one assembled for the singular, genre-hopping Italian director Valerio Zurlini—who needs to have that happen again, nearly twenty-five years later.)
Our friend and mentor Elliot Lavine was unable to attend our events this past year, but he gave me a long-distance slap on the back from Portland when he saw that we’d included THE INTRUDER and NOTHING BUT A MAN as part of the MID/MAD lineup. “Elated to see these being screened, but sad to think that they might be even scarier for audiences in the 2020s than they were back in the 1960s!” Elliot’s thoughts epitomized so much of the vibe in 2022, a year of clashingly mixed emotions…
And our valued colleague and curatorial co-conspirator Phoebe Green was delighted to discover the strong response to our offbeat “women’s film” double feature, OLIVIA and HITCH-HIKE (aka LES PETITS MATINS), showcasing the incredibly diverse talents of pioneering female director Jacqueline Audry. The latter film, from the early 60s, reflected its time with a knowing wink that galvanized the audience with its wry blend of fantasy and realism, all combined in a “road picture” like no other, populated with faces made familiar to them from their appearances in so many of the French noirs they’d seen over the years (Robert Hossein, of course—answering our “caption question” above—but also Lino Ventura, Arletty, Bernard Blier, Daniel Gelin, Pierre Brasseur, and Jean-Claude Brialy). Phoebe’s essay on this double bill is eminently worthy of a re-read…
Many in our audiences were favorably disposed to the brash young Jean-Pierre Mocky, whose two early works (THE CHASERS and THE BIG SCARE) were merely the opening salvos in a controversial career that spanned six more decades. We were able to perform a nifty segue for Mocky when November rolled around, featuring him in one of his last “heartthrob” roles as the betrayed son who is institutionalized against his will in HEAD AGAINST THE WALL, which played as part of our opening night double bill for FRENCH ‘22.
AND our flagship series was packed with rare gems, from the Occupation Era (GOUPI MAINS ROUGES aka IT HAPPENED AT THE INN, MENACES aka THREATS, LA MAIN DU DIABLE aka SINNER’S CARNIVAL, SORTILEGES aka SPELLS) to the end of the classic French film noir era and beyond (our trilogy of Pierre Granier-Deferre films). We discovered to our surprise that only a plurality of our 2022 audience has been with us since the very beginning, so that our reprise of four festival favorites from our earliest days proved to be “first-time” affairs for many.
So much the better, then, for the chance to see the marvelous Ms. Demongeot (sadly, too beautiful to be taken seriously as an actress at the time) and to wind things up on a high note with a closing night double feature showcasing the two anchoring figures of our defiantly revisionist French noir series—Hossein (of course!) and Jean Gabin (ditto!). THE WALLS OF MALAPAGA tied together poetic realism, film noir, rubble film and neo-realism with the type of astringent performance that Gabin perfected after WWII despite audiences not quite being ready for his deepening furrow of world-weariness. He’s matched by Isa Miranda, ten years before her turn in A KISS FOR A KILLER as the wealthy dowager in danger, when she is still soulfully beautiful and a powerfully emotional counterweight for Gabin.
BUT it always comes down to Hossein—the architect of the “last wave” of French film noir in the mid-1950s, with nearly two dozen films in that most protean of genres that are—as Phoebe Green intoned in one of our promotional spots—”each unlike one another.” His performance in CHAIR DE POULE, Julien Duvivier’s matchless swan song to classic noir tropes (turning the gall of James Hadley Chase into manna from hell), is flawlessly fraught and utterly real, even down to his bitter, ironic, meta-existential laugh in the film’s incendiary conclusion.
There is nothing like seeing an audience leaving a downbeat film with a kind of giddy, sulphurous high: that made my trip up to San Francisco in mid-November (after a health scare had forced me to miss our first weekend) into something truly special. We’re working hard on what we hope will be three (3!) upcoming series at the Roxie—and, quite possibly, elsewhere as well: stay tuned for an announcement early in the new year—that will replicate that feeling for you in 2023. (To those in farther-flung places who’ve not had us with you since the onset of the pandemic, we hope you’ll remain patient—we are still working on returning to the scenes of our earlier glorious crimes.)
MY best wishes to all readers for a healthy, happy, film-filled year in 2023—with dozens more MCP rediscoveries soon to be revealed. A bientot!