Film Classics Featured in Spring Edition of “Buffalo Film Seminars”

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- A remastered version of the Japanese epic "Ran" and the classic horror masterpiece "The Bride of Frankenstein" are among the films on tap for the spring edition of "Buffalo Film Seminars: Conversations about Great Films with Diane Christian and Bruce Jackson," a 14-week series of screenings and discussions sponsored by the University at Buffalo and the Market Arcade Film and Arts Centre.

The screenings will take place at 7 p.m. on Tuesdays, beginning Jan. 16 and running through April 24, in the Market Arcade theater, 639 Main St., Buffalo.

Each film will be introduced by Christian, SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor in the UB Department of English, and Jackson, SUNY Distinguished Professor and Samuel P. Capen Professor of American Culture, also in the UB English department.

Following a short break at the end of each film, Christian and Jackson will lead discussions with members of the audience.

The screenings are part of "Contemporary Cinema" (Eng 442), a UB undergraduate course being taught by the pair. The screenings also are open to the general public.

Admission to each film will be $6.50 for the general public and $4.50 for students and senior citizens. Reduced-price tickets for the entire series can be purchased through Jan. 23 at the theater.

The films will be free for those enrolled in the UB course. Those wishing to earn college credit in relation to the series should register for the course.

Free monitored parking will be available in the M&T lot opposite the theater's Washington Street entrance.

At UB, the film seminars are sponsored by the Capen Chair in American Culture, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Department of English and WBFO 88.7 FM, UB's National Public Radio affiliate.

The semester's lineup, with film descriptions culled from the seminars' Web site, http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~bjackson/schedspr2001.html:

• Jan. 16: "The Big Parade," 1925, directed by King Vidor. A silent-film classic, this film has been called the first great realistic war movie and John Gilbert's greatest starring role. It will be accompanied on the electronic organ by legendary film organist Philip Carli.

• Jan. 23: "Gold Diggers of 1933," 1933, directed by Mervyn LeRoy. This film features great chorus girls (Joan Blondell, Ruby Keeler, Ginger Rogers), the Great Depression (played by itself), great songs ("We're In the Money"), great Busby Berkeley numbers, the great Dick Powell, Guy Kibbee and Ned Sparks, and, at the end, a soupçon of reality. A great movie.

• Jan. 30: "Bride of Frankenstein," 1935, directed by James Whale. Starring Boris Karloff, Elsa Lanchester (great as Mary Shelley and the silver-haired bride) and Colin Clive, the macabre film "is generally considered one of the greatest horror films of all time -- a spectacular, bizarre, high-camp, excessive, humorous, farcical and surrealistic film," writes critic Tim Dirks.

• Feb. 6: "Exterminating Angel," 1962, directed by Luis Buñuel. This grand bourgeois dinner party was conceived by the greatest surrealist filmmaker during his second self-imposed exile from Franco's Spain. He cooked it up between two other great films: "Viridiana" (1960) and "Belle de Jour" (1967). Christian and Jackson call this film their "favorite among the four great films about dinner -- the others being "Le Grand Bouffe," "Babette's Feast" and "My Dinner with Andre."

• Feb. 13: Spring Double Feature Night with "Ivan the Terrible, Part I" (1943) and "Ivan the Terrible, Part II" (1946), both directed by Sergei Eisenstein. Well, so maybe not a real double feature. While Eisenstein conceived these two films as a whole, he experienced a three-year hiatus between the two parts and Stalin's displeasure at the portrayal of Ivan's secret police held up public release of Part II for another 12 years. "Ivan the Terrible" is, as Leonard Maltin puts it, "film spectacle of the highest order."

• Feb. 20: "Bicycle Thieves," 1947, directed by Vittorio de Sica. When "Bicycle Thieves" came out, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had no category for best foreign film, so it gave this film a special Academy Award. Long on Sight & Sound's greatest-films-of-all-time list, this masterpiece of Italian neorealism was re-released last year, which is why it has been included in the series. The film is often referred to as "The Bicycle Thief," but that's a mistranslation of the Italian title ("Ladri di biciclette") and obscures what the movie is all about.

• Feb. 27: "Les Enfants du paradis," 1945, directed by Marcel Carné. One of the greatest films about theater ever made. And about love triangles. The title is usually translated "Children of Paradise," but more properly it's "Children of the Gods," the people who occupy the worst seats in the theater, the segment of the audience most vocal in its praise or displeasure. A timeless masterpiece of filmmaking (and storytelling), writes Leonard Maltin, focusing on a rough-and-tumble theatrical troupe in 19th-century France. Filming began in 1943 in Nazi-occupied France,

but wasn't complete until 1945. According to The Washington Post, "Many of the 'Paradise' actors were members of the Resistance and, in fact, a certain Monsieur Robert Le Vigan (later replaced in the movie by Pierre Renoir) was reportedly a Nazi collaborator and disappeared under mysterious circumstances."

• March 6: No screening -- UB spring break

• March 13: "Kiss Me Deadly," 1955, directed by Robert Aldrich. Ralph Meeker plays Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer in this no-big-name-star film noir classic. Critic Tim Dirks calls it "the definitive, apocalyptic nihilistic film noir of all time...It has all the elements of great film noir -- destructive femme fatales, low-life gangsters, expressionistically lit night-time scenes, a vengeful quest and a dark mood of hopelessness."

• March 20: "Once Upon a Time in the West," 1968, directed by Sergio Leone. The so-called "spaghetti westerns" didn't just revive a genre that was then moribund in America; they also helped the rest of us understand what westerns were all about. No European filmmaker understood them better than Sergio Leone, first with his Clint Eastwood man-with-no-name trilogy and then with "Once Upon a Time in the West," which some critics consider not only Leone's masterpiece, but also one of the greatest westerns ever made.

• March 27: "The Last Picture Show," 1971, directed by Peter Bogdanovich. This is "American Graffiti" set in Larry McMurtry's West Texas hometown, with a lot less rock and roll and a lot more insight and soul. "The Last Picture Show" is probably Bogdanovich's best film. The picture received eight Academy Award nominations and garnered two wins.

• April 3: "The French Connection," 1971, directed by William Friedkin. This film received eight Oscar nominations and recorded wins for best actor, director, editing, picture and screenplay. Based on a real-life, New York City narcotics case, this picture is one of filmdom's great cops-and-bad-guys films, and features one of the two all-time-great film car chases -- the other was in Peter Yates' "Bullitt."

• April 10: "The Man Who Would be King," 1975, directed by John Huston. Huston was the most literary of American film directors, with "Treasure of the Sierra Madre," "The Maltese Falcon," "Moby Dick" and his last film, "The Dead" -- based on James Joyce's short story -- being only a few of the literary masterpieces he brought to the screen. When he started trying to make this film in the 1950s, he wanted to star Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart. Time passed and so did Gable and Bogart, so when he finally did get to make it, Daniel Dravot and Peaches Carnahan were portrayed by Sean Connery and Michael Caine. They're fabulous, as is this entire gorgeous and brilliantly achieved movie.

• April 17: "Killer of Sheep," 1977, directed by Charles Burnett. A superb fiction film about life in South Central Los Angeles that looks and feels like a documentary. Burnett made this as his graduate film in the UCLA film school for about $10,000 when he was 23. The actors are people he knew in his own Watts neighborhood.

• April 24: "Ran," 1985, directed by Akira Kurosawa. Kurosawa's version of Shakespeare's "King Lear," set in medieval Japan, is one of the all-time-great film epics. Critic Roger Ebert calls it "a great, glorious achievement." The film was pulled from circulation several years ago and was unavailable until last summer, when five new prints with a remastered soundtrack and newly translated and more readable subtitles were made available for distribution. This screening will be the first time the new version of Kurosawa's masterpiece has been shown in the Buffalo area.