Shanghai Express
Asian-Americans in Hollywood: Anna May Wong Returning to the United States after years of working in Europe, Anna May Wong was cast in this Josef von Sternberg classic, dubbed “Grand Hotel on wheels.”
Hallelujah!
Make Mine Musicals After three years of trying to convince Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to make the film, director King Vidor finally broke through with his first sound film.
Distant
Rochester Premiere Available in US theaters for the first time, Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan wrote, directed, photographed, produced and co-edited this profoundly beautiful picture about detachment and isolation without allowing the austerity of his story to overwhelm the heartwarming, often comic, moments that permeate this award-winning film.
The Wild One
Conscientious Director: Stanley Kramer The Wild One established Marlon Brando as an archetypal antihero. Riding his own hog in the mother of all motorcycle flicks, Brando and his gang terrorize a California town while banging heads with Lee Marvin’s pack of punk bikers.
Daughter of Shanghai
Asian-Americans in Hollywood: Anna May Wong Following her disappointment at not even being considered for the major role of O-Lan in MGM’s adaptation of Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth (the role went to Luise Rainer, who won the Academy Award for her performance),
The Bitter Tea of General Yen
Licentious and Suggestive: Hollywood Before the Code Steamy miscegenation highlights this East meets West, pre-Code drama about the fiancé of a young American missionary (the always exciting Barbara Stanwick) who finds herself drawn to the sensual Chinese warlord,
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Licentious and Suggestive: Hollywood Before the Code The definitive version of the Robert Louis Stevenson novella emphasizes the theme of duality through extensive play of shadow and light and a strong interior performance by Frederic March in the title role.
The Caine Mutiny
Conscientious Director: Stanley Kramer> On the Pacific Ocean during World War II, Ensign Willie Keith (Robert Francis) reports for duty to the fictitious naval minesweeper USS Caine. The slovenly crew is soon put in order by new Captain Philip Queeg (Humphrey Bogart). The Caine Mutiny received seven Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture and Best Actor (Bogart).
The Cheat
Asian-Americans in Hollywood: Sessue Hayakawa Painstakingly restored at George Eastman Museum, DeMille's 1915 tragic tale is a rarely seen masterwork of silent cinema. Praised for its inventive use of lighting and shadow, The Cheat is as visually striking as many of the classics of German Expressionism.
The Story of Temple Drake
Curator’s Choice | Licentious and Suggestive The Story of Temple Drake (Stephen Roberts, US 1934, 70 min., 35mm)
Air Doll
Kore-eda Catchup A present-day fable for the increasing disconnect we find in urban life, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Air Doll transports the Galatea myth to present-day Tokyo.
Asian Americans in Hollywood
Asian Americans in Hollywood
13 Films on Screen
Last summer the Dryden Theatre presented the series “In Solidarity: Celebrating Asian/Pacific American Directors,” which focused on directors of Asian and Pacific Islander descent who told stories through their own lens. But Asian Americans were working in film since the silent era, both in front of and behind the camera. This series will highlight three of the biggest Asian American contributors from the first seven decades of cinema: actress Anna May Wong, actor Sessue Hayakawa, and cinematographer (and George Eastman Award honoree) James Wong Howe.
Anna May Wong, born to Chinese parents in Los Angeles, started acting in her teens and during the silent era became a well-known actress and fashion icon. Unfortunately, many of the roles offered to her tended to demean her culture, but Wong shone in the roles she did accept and delivered memorable performances from the silent era into the 1940s. Despite her fame and popularity, Wong’s greatest disappointment was being turned down for the role of O-Lan in MGM’s adaptation of Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth.
Japanese-born Sessue Hayakawa emigrated to the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century and turned to acting in 1914 and quickly became a matinee idol with the release of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat in 1915. He became highly sought after but was frustrated by being typecast. In response, he formed his own production company, Haworth Productions. There he made nineteen films over five years, including one of his greatest successes, The Dragon Painter, in 1919. Hayakawa continued to work through the 1960s and appeared in over 100 films over his fifty-year career, and earned an Academy Award nomination for his supporting role in The Bridge on the River Kwai.
James Wong Howe got his big break into cinematography when he took some still photos of silent star Mary Miles Minter and darkened her eyes in the image by having her look at a dark surface. Minter requested that Howe be the cinematographer on her next film and a career spanning fifty years and nearly 140 films. Howe’s continual innovation in his field led to ten Academy Award nominations and being recognized as one of the ten most influential cinematographers of all time. He received the George Eastman Award at the George Eastman Museum for his work in 1957.
March 1: The Toll of the Sea (Chester M. Franklin, 1922)
March 8: Piccadilly (E.A. Dupont, 1929)
March 15: Shanghai Express (Josef von Sternberg, 1932)
March 22: Daughter of Shanghai (Robert Florey, 1937)
March 29: The Cheat (Cecil B. DeMille, 1915)
April 5: The Dragon Painter (William Worthington, 1919
April 12: Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean, 1957)
April 19: Mantrap (Victor Fleming, 1926)
April 26: Transatlantic (William K. Howard, 1931)
May 10: Picnic (Joshua Logan, 1955)
May 17: The Old Man and the Sea (John Sturges, US 1958)
May 26: Hud (Martin Ritt, US 1963)
May 27: Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, US 1957)
Licentious and Suggestive: Hollywood Before the Code
Licentious and Suggestive: Hollywood Before the Code
The Motion Picture Production Code was adopted by Hollywood studios in 1930. This set of guidelines attempted to persuade filmmakers toward a more aspirational view of their art, and the effect it had on their audience. Due to the mature content being brought to the screen and the occasionally scandalous behavior by filmmakers and stars off-screen, The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), led by Will H. Hays, attempted to reverse the negative press and protests by religious groups laid against the industry in an attempt to save it.
The Code, however, wasn’t fully enforced until the middle of 1934 and there were hundreds of sound films created in this period that pushed the boundaries of content, theme, and, sometimes, decency. From dramas to historical epics, from gangsters to freaks, the films in this series exemplify elements of what Hays was trying to filter out of motion pictures.
March 3: The Divorcee (Robert Z. Leonard, 1930)
March 10: The Sign of the Cross (Cecil B. DeMille, 1932)
March 23: The Bitter Tea of General Yen (Frank Capra, 1932)
March 24: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Rouben Mamoulian, 1931)
March 30: The Story of Temple Drake (Stephen Roberts, 1934)
April 14: Queen Christina (Rouben Mamoulian, 1933)
April 21: Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932)
April 27: Freaks (Tod Browning, 1932)
April 28: Tarzan and His Mate (Cedric Gibbons, US 1934)
Kore-Eda Catchup
Kore-Eda Catchup
Inspired by the availability of his 2009 film Air Doll in the United States for the first time, the Dryden Theatre is offering you a chance to catch up on films from Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda that have never screened in Rochester before. Best-known for his 2018 Palme d’Or-winning film Shoplifters, Kore-eda has been making films for over thirty years, but has truly risen to international attention over the last decade with films like After Life, I Wish, and The Third Murder, which have all screened at the Dryden. With the US premiere of Air Doll, most of Kore-eda’s oeuvre is now available to our audience and we’ll be bringing you premieres of five of his films in March and April. In the tradition of Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu, Kore-eda works in a humanist style, exploring the inner lives of average people in extraordinary situations.
Like Father, Like Son is a story about two families who discover their sons were switched at birth. Our Little Sister follows the story of an orphaned teenage girl as she tries to integrate into the life of her three older half-sisters. In After the Storm, a divorced man struggles to find his place within the existing family structure while maintaining a relationship with his son. The near-future fantasy Air Doll mirrors Pinocchio by examining what happens when a blow-up doll comes alive and attempts to make a life for herself. Kore-eda’s first non-Japanese film, The Truth, stars Catherine Denuve, Juliette Binoche, and Ethan Hawke. Binoche is the daughter of actress Deneuve, who has just released her memoir, to the consternation of Binoche and her husband, Hawke.
March 31: Air Doll (2009)
April 1: Like Father, Like Son (2013)
April 8: Our Little Sister (2015)
April 15: After the Storm (2016)
April 22: Air Doll (2009)
April 29: The Truth (2019)
The Good Bad Man
Silent Tuesdays This night of Douglas Fairbanks and Allan Dwan films begins with The Good Bad Man, in which Fairbanks plays the cheerful and aimless outlaw “Passin’ Through,” whose holdups include robbing a train conductor of his ticket puncher and stealing food from the town store only to give it to a friendless orphan.
I Walk Alone
Noirvember Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas team up for the first time as former bootlegging partners fighting for the love of Lizabeth Scott. Returning from jail after fourteen years, Lancaster is surprised to find that Douglas is a legitimate businessman now who owns the nightclub where Scott sings.
Scrooge
Holidays Charles Dickens’s immortal classic comes to life in this musical adaptation with songs and music by Leslie Bricusse, who had recently done the same for the enormously popular Doctor Dolittle (1967). Albert Finney stars as the eponymous Ebenezer Scrooge, a cruel employer and misanthrope who would rather not have to deal with the Christmas holiday at all, and begrudges his sole employee the one day off.
Splice Here: A Projected Odyssey
Rochester Premiere “Film is dead!” was the mantra that accompanied the dawn of digital cinema. But was it really true? For those who worked with film, it was clear that the digital experience and film simply weren’t the same thing. A decade ago, projectionist and filmmaker Rob Murphy decided to engage the debate with this film, asking the people who would really know: his fellow projectionists.
Metropolitan
Special Screening On the bleeding edge of the American independent cinema boom of the 1990s, writer-director Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan remains a leading example of what can be done with a low budget and a surplus of inspiration and determination.
Sweating the Small Stuff
Japanese Ātohausu Cinema | Encore Screening Blurring the line between fiction and reality, writer-director Ryûtarô Ninomiya casts himself as a character named Ryûtarô Ninomiya. This character, a listless worker at an auto junkyard, wanders through life as a creature of unwelcome habit.
