Fellini + Lubitsch
An interesting event at the Cinematheque tomorrow night inaugurates a great weekend of films. Father Don Cozzens, a noted author and teacher, leads a discussion after La Strada, Federico Fellini’s 1954 Oscar winner (7:00 pm). Pope Francis has cited this as his favorite movie, and Fr. Cozzens will try to figure out why, along with the audience. I haven’t seen La Strada for years but remember liking this compassionate, poignant, and sometimes funny film very much. Special price of $10 for this event.
Robert Frank
Friday brings another special event with a very different film–a rare showing of photographer Robert Frank’s Cocksucker Blues, a 1972 documentary about the Rolling Stones. It’s the movie the Stones never wanted you to see, revealing their drug use and sexual antics (as though we didn’t know). This film, showing Friday at 9:15, has another special price of $15.
 If that’s not enough, this weekend provides another great comedy by Ernst Lubitsch (Sat. 5:15; Sun. 4:00).  Trouble in Paradise (1932) has been called a perfect film and among his very excellent films is regarded as the best. How can you pass that up? I’ve never seen it, but so enjoyed To Be or Not to Be and Ninotchka the past couple weeks that I’m looking forward to this one. Lubitsch’s movies are pure enjoyment–beautifully written, shot, and acted.
I read about after seeing it last night. During the shoot, I guess everyone was speaking in his or her own dialect, including Basehart’s English. Fellini was apparently not concerned at all with matching up speech to people’s lips, and it really wasn’t distracting.
I always thought of Richard Basehart as a B actor, but he’s so good in this movie.
I’ve always wondered whether Richard Basehart (the clown in La Strada) really spoke Italian in the movie and finally looked it up. From what I could gather, it was dubbed afterwards like many Italian movies, but it seems that he did his own dubbing for the Italian version.