April 17th 2013. Pick Of the Day.

WILL SUCCESS SPOIL ROCK HUNTER?, Frank Tashlin's perfect pop cocktail blending blunt farce with cutting commentary, screens todaya and tomorrow as it winds down its week long run at FIlm Forum. Chose it already, and as much as Jayne Mansfield tempts a second gaze I gotta stick to the rules. Damn rules.

Otto Preminger's EXODUS begins a three day run as part of MOMA's Auteurist History of Film series. The director who once revelled in status controversial remains so, and this adap of Leon Uris' epic novel about the forging of the Isreali state will either grab you or make you realize it runs 214 minutes, regardless of yourt politics. Plus Paul Newman makes for one good lookin' Jew. I don't wanna cause a shondah, but it misses as my Pick.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center's continuing trib to Brazillian Cinema Novo pioneer Carlos Diegues today offers QUILOMBO, the tale of rebelling slaves in a South American sugar cane mill who then rise up to take on the colonial military. Sounds gripping, but my Pick goes to a film examining another exploited people, ony these citizens have not left their homeland. Read on.

MOMA's tribute to the immediate effect German expressionism had on Hollywood continues apace. The Weimar Touch today fetes a pair of master stylists with Edgar G. Ulmer's GREEN FIELDS and Robert Siodmak's HATRED. The former has been hailed as a benchmark in Yiddsh cinema, in spite of the fact that it cost 8,000 bucks and filmed in New Jersey. The latter is called HATRED. Synopsis unneccesary. Gems, but neither my Pick.

And over at the Mid-Manhattan Library the Three Auteurs of World Cinema series ambles along with Federico Fellini's THE WHITE SHEIK. The social structures of family, marriage and community are all, of course, undone by the movies, in this case literally as a new bride foresakes her husband to seek out the star of a matinee serial. It's Fellini, you expected different? Charming as hell, but I take a pass, because on this day that sees Preminger in Isreal, Ulmer in Joisey and Siodmak in Shang-Hai, Sam Fuller's spending some time in Japan.

The former crime reporter first succumbed to Hollywood's allure in the early 30's as screenwriter and ghostwriter, but it's his postwar output, the worldview forged by both that newspaper background and his experience at Normandy and Sicily and other spine-stiffening WWII battles, that found him his greatest film success and endeared him to generations of movie lovers. In 1955 he turned his hardscrabble gaze toward postwar Japan and the grimy underworld that had blossomed during America's occupation, but he chose to temper his usual gunpowder palette through the use of Technicolor and Cinemascope, the latter visiting Japan's shores for the first time. The result was no less grim or unforgiving, but the DP work by one Joseph MacDonald remains among the best of the era and surely of the director's CV. To top it off tough guys Robert Ryan and Robert Stack duke it out against the backdrop of a society beaten and occupied, but still struggling to maintain a shred of dignity. Matchstick, meet powderkeg.

Sam Fuller's HOUSE OF BAMBOO screens tonight and tomorrow at 10:10pm at Film Forum. Kimono optional.

Follow me on Twitter @NitrateStock!

Like the page at Facebook.com/NitrateStock!

The folks at Occupy Sandy could still use your help, but any efforts directed toward the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing is welcome too.

As always be safe, be sound, and make sure the next guy is too. Back tomorrow with a new Pick!

-Joe Walsh