March 1st 2013. Pick Of The Day.

MARCH!

That's not an order, I'm just happy to see the month! It is, after all, the tenth that sees this site in operation. Whatever will I do once Stock hits the 1-year mark...?

Film Forum gets St. Patrick's month in general and this day in particular started with four count 'em four selections from their tribute to Hollywood circa 1933. Max Ophul's LIEBELEI concerns a doomed romance set against a turn of the century Vienna, and serves as an early example of the filmmaker's trademark style. Mae West teams with Cary Grant for a second and last time in I'M NO ANGEL, screening as a two-fer today with the very naked Hedy Lamarr in ECSTASY. Both gave Catholic censorship boards the same treatment Joe Theismann gets from his prostate, and helped spur the advent of the Hays Code, which delights programmer Bruce Goldstein to no end it seems. And Miriam Hopkins essays William Faulkner's ruined upper class good-girl in the seamy STORY OF TEMPLE DRAKE. All worthy screenings as is the entire fest they screen as part of. Not my Pick.

Landmark Sunshine Cinema revives the oft-told tale of the private dick who gets all the ladies. Richard Roundtreee brings the suave and the savvy as SHAFT, screening at midnight. I can dig it, but not my Pick.

Midnight at IFC Center offers two very different horror sojourns. James Cameron's too-good-to-be-a-sequel ALIENS was pretty much the class of the summer of '86, and may still be the flick he never topped. WAKE IN FRIGHT was lost to obscurity on VHS shelves and late night cable until its recent reappraisal and restoration. Here the horror visited on mannered schoolmaster Gary Bond is provided by outbackers Jack Thompson and Donald Pleasance. Or is it...? Both very worthy offerings, but not my Pick.

And at midnight across the river the Nitehawk Cinema welcomes Michael Rooker's HENRY for a weekend stay. About as raw and powerful a horror biopic can get without wallowing in true exploitation, director John MacNaughton manages a balance that ultimately yields a far more disturbing experience. How can I say no to this flick paired with the Nitehawk's awesome root beer and tater tots? It's tough, but a master is unspooling this evening, one of the giants of postwar cinema, repped tonight by the movie that first thrust him onto the world stage as a potentially important filmmaker. A work of art that also had the balls to challenge the conventions of the medium itself and helped point its new postwar direction. Of course I'm referring to the cinema's greatest offscreen samurai.

Mah boy Akira Kurosawa took his first swipe at greatness as a painter. Let's be glad that didn't entirely pan out. He took that same eye for composition and applied to what would become TOHO studios for a gig as an assistant director. After 24 films as AD he begged TOHO to purchase the rights to a new adventure story, samurai actioner SANSHIRO SUGATA, to serve as his directorial debut. They agreed and a new career was born. SUGATA was the focus of some friction, the wartime Japanese censors furrowing their brows over what they percieved to be too great an Anglo influence on the film, but they acquiesced, in no small part due to the efforts of director Yasujiro Ozu. The film was a hit, prompting a sequel and securing for the moment the career of its director.

Then a funny thing happened. Hiroshima. The war ended and the formally militaristic society was now under occupation. TOHO and its rival studios were allowed to continue production, but now it was American censors who the filmmakers had to contend with. Kurosawa took the full weight of these events to heart, never a fan of his government's warmaking ideology but disillusioned by its defeat. He left as subject matter his nation's past temporarily to focus on its present, and turned an angry eye toward the terrible blight his fellow citizens lived in postwar, and the factions that took advantage of good struggling everyday men and women. The thugs of the Yakuza were a particular focus of his ire. Classics like DRUNKEN ANGEL and STRAY DOG came from this period, but still he strove to find his country's soul, where it resided at the time and where it had come from to begin with. Perhaps the propaganda of the war and its wake and its attendant contradictions influenced the tale he would tell next, one of rape and murder and the four witnesses who recall the events, but in any event he chose to explore his country's present by again going into its past. Not merely offering multiple answers, and therefore perhaps no answers, the resulting film placed the very veracity of film storytelling itself into question. Enlightenment, disillusionment, confusion. All valid responses to one of the most important films ever made, and the one that truly emboldened one of my favorite filmmakers that ever lived. Domi arigato.

Akira Kurosawa's RASHOMON unspools tonight at the Rubin Museum as part of their Cabaret Cinema series, which means ya gotta buy a sake in order to secure a tik to the screening. You got a better way to kill two hours tonight?

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Be safe and sound and make sure the next guy is too! March 2013 classic screening calendar is live, Suckahz! Go Knicks!

-Joe Walsh