April 11th 2013. Pick Of the Day.

Jules Dassin's NEVER ON SUNDAY blithely traipses through the second of its three-day run at MOMA as part of the museum's ongoing Auteurist History of Film series. Dassin's Hellenophiliac Homer travels to the lively seaside town of Piraeus and attempts to "educate" the free spirited Melina Mercouri's Ilya in order to correct the flagrant wasting of her potential. To which she replies OPPA! Took my Pick yesterday so sadly takes my Nix today.

The Anthology Film Archives kicks off their Middle Ages on Film series with tonight's screening of Youssef Chahine's SALADIN, to date the most expensive film ever produced by a Middle Eastern studio. A Crusades epic told from the viewpoint of the Musilm forces, the film affords the once Sultan of Egypt and Syria and legendary leader of the Islamist forces the widescreen biopic treatment Hollywood routinely rolled out in the era of BEN HUR, THE TEN COMMANDEMENTS, and KHARTOUM. All that's missing is Chuck Heston. Well, define missing you could ask. Very tempting but it will screen twice more during the month, so I pass it up in favor of a Grand Slam from one of my filmmaker heroes. Keep reading.

The Clearview Chelsea Cinemas offers Hitchcock's last near-classic MARNIE, featuring Tippi Hedren as the eponymous cat burglar and Sean Connery as the man who blackmails her into marriage and sex. Tha Mastah was a perv. Always worth your attendance but screens fairly often in our burg, so I pass without guilt, which is more than Big Al could say. Ba dum dum.

Back at MOMA their comprehensive examination of the influence German Expressionism of the 20's had on the future of the medium has only just begun. Today The Weimar Touch offers Julien Duvivier's take on THE GOLEM, the timeworn anthropomorph from Jewish folklore. The director had fled to Prague at this point and would eventually make his way to Hollywood, where he would find varying degrees of success, but this effort fully conveys the sense of dread felt by a threatened people and the desire for a supernatural defender for protection and eventual salvation. It's sort of interesting to me how both Superman and Batman came from this singular mythology. Or maybe it's me. Either way not my Pick, which I reserve today for one of my pantheon filmmakers, somebody both instrumental to the movement celebrated herein but also strangely the beneficiery of that influence once in a new home.

Frtiz Lang was Fritz Lang, and that sez it all. Okay, if you need more biographical background he was perhaps the most powerful figure in the era of Weimar cinema, if not ultimately the most influential. He quickly and intuitively synthesized the early expressionistic works that emerged at the end of the first World War into nefarious entertainments designed for popular consumption. In a way he is largely responsible for the adding of dramatic punch to esoteric style. It was in this early period that shadows became not merely incidental to a scene's lighting, but a character in their own right, the first time the audience was invited to ponder the contents within the murky black. Lang was of a temperment to wallow in this black, to explore, and to entice the audience to follow within. The guy wore a monocle, was anyone shocked?

After a monumental body of work littered with commercial and artistic success he was beckoned upon completion of THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE to Goebbels' chambers, and therein offered the position of head of film propoganda. To which he replied with a resounding Fuck You, even though he made sure noone was around to hear it. First landing in France he filmed a version of the play LILLIOM, which would later be sung onscreen as CAROUSEL, but here found a screen iteration as haunting as a Fritz Lang could deliver. As France's situation became precarious Lang finally fled to Hollywood, which had long sought to tender his services. MGM won the bidding war for the great Teutonic Tyrant, and they soon came to second guess that victory. Lang languished in La La Land for a couple of years before the director and his studio, mostly out of sheer exasperation, agreed on a project suited to the filmmaker's tastes and MGM's eye on the bottom line. What resulted is a classic, largely overshadowed by the same director's M, perhaps the ultimate film evisceration of mob justice, but remaining no less potent a tale on the same topic, one which would frequently serve as his theme after his flight from Nazi gangsterism. The great Spencer Tracy and Sylvia Sydney star as a buoyant and betrothed couple violently separated by the deep dark forces of the lizard brain's worst instincts. I won't go further out of respect for those who've yet to see it, so I'll simply IMPLORE you to catch this masterpiece on MOMA's big screen today or tomorrow. You may never get another chance, which is kinda what this film's about in the end anyway.

Fritz Lang's chilling FURY screens at MOMA today at 4:30pm as part of their The Weimar Touch retrospective. Bring something or someone to hug. Trust me.

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-Joe Walsh