June 29th 2013. Pick Of The Day.

The Nitehawk Cinema in beaming, bustling B-Burg offers up two vastly different brunchtime experiences this afternoon. Carl Theodore Dryer's THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC screens side by side with Zucker-Abrams-Zucker's AIRPLANE! Dryer's film made daring use of extreme close-ups in the silent era to convey devotion that borders on madness, while the ZAZ team's effort offers up Kareem Abdul Jabbar, an inflatable "Auto-Pilot", and the wrong day for Lloyd Bridges to stop sniffing glue. My menu suggestions? The Egg-White Quiche for the Dryer and the Chicken Fried Steak for the latter. Good stuff, indeed, but it eludes my Pick this last Saturday in June. One of the masters is screening today. Actually he is Tha Mahstah.

ROSEMARY'S BABY, Roman Polanski's ode to body horror, gets a week-long unspooling at that classic film Mecca on West Houston, Film Forum. Screens so often I can't remember if I made it my Pick yesterday or last year, so I choose a different and influential master of the boogah boogah this day. No knock on the Polanski flick, just, damn, this screens a lot. I mean YAY, this screens a lot!

MoMA's still-breathing, exhaustive tribute to a true film pioneer, Allan Dwan and the Rise and Fall of the Hollywood Studios, today brings the classic film enthusiast amongst us 1947's DRIFTWOOD, 1957's THE RIVER'S EDGE and that same year's THE RESTLESS BREED. Natalie Wood pines for a puppy in the first, Ray Milland's thief uses Anthony Quinn's guide to elude justice in the second, and Scott Brady menaces Anne Bancroft in the third. Katherine Quinn, widow of the screen legend, will be on hand to discuss her husband's career in general and EDGE in particular. How can I pass this up, you ask? Not easily, but an equally important premiere occurs this eve, and I can't pass up any film experience akin to stepping into a virtual time machine. I'm nostalgic like that.

The Silent Clowns Film Series resumes at the Library for the Perfoming Arts today with a RARE screening of Sydney Chaplin's 1927 THE MISSING LINK. Though greatly surpassed in both vision and success by his younger brother, whose name was Charles in case you need telling, Syd Chaplin was instrumental in starting his kid bro's career, begging his boss Fred Karno to hire Charlie so the brothers could perform as part of Karno's popular comic theater troupe. After his own successful career as a slapstick star Sydney later became Charlie's biz manager and trusted advisor, but today pianist Ben Model and curator Bruce Lawton fete the older bro's talents before the cameras. HARD to pass up, but a different type of silent film experience unfolds later this day, one that will actually drag my lazy frame out to Brooklyn. Read on.

Midnight fare in our film-crazed metropolis includes Doris Wishman's sleazesploitation gem BAD GIRLS GO TO HELL at the Nitehawk in Brooklyn and Terry Gilliam's THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN at IFC Center on the patriotically monickered Avenue of the Americas. As BAD GIRLS took my Pick yesterday and the grand BARON was a Pick last month I gotta pass. Even had I not chosen these gems so recently they'd miss as my Pick today. A truly magnificent and potentially awe-inducing film experience occurs today, and I can't wait to take my reserved seat.

There's this guy named Alfred Hitchcock who's kinda sorta important to the entire timeline of the medium which serves as this website's obsession. Lauded for his 40's classics like REBECCA, SABOTEUR, NOTORIOUS, LIFEBOAT and SUSPICION, his 50's works like STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, REAR WINDOW, VERTIGO and NORTH BY NORTHWEST, his work form the 30's in the UK is not as widely enjoyed outside of the true Cinegeek, and his work in the silent era is mainly the province of cinematic scholars. Movies used to be shot using a little something I like to call nitrate stock, a highly flammable and rapidly deteriorating film base. In the 50's a new cellulose triacetate (stick with me) film stock was manufactured cheaply enough to replace nitrate based film, so the odds of these films surviving long-term greatly increased. Anything before 1950, not so much. Martin Scorsese, film preservationist extraordinaire and all-around swell maniac, claims that "half of all American films made before 1950 and over 90% of films made before 1929 are lost forever." So tonight's painstaking and expensive unveiling is especially worthy of praise and excitement not merely because it's a restoration, but restorations.

One Hitchcock film from the silent era, THE MOUNTAIN EAGLE, is gone for good, or so it'll be until it's discovered in a Chilean insane asylum one day. The remaining 9 were chosen for a very special project from the British Film Institute a couple of years ago; full DCP restorations from the best surviving remaining elements and newly composed orchestral scores commissioned to accompany them. To the best of my knowledge no film resto project has included a multiple number of films, let alone this many, and the venerable Brooklyn Academy of Music was chosen to host the North American premiere of all 9 films, in its own restoration, the Harvey Theater movie palace, tonight offering reserved seating for the films and live orchestral accompaniment from the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. This is as close a ticket you'll ever get to travel back to 1927, and the cheapest. Just wear a suit, Stockahz. This is Tha Mahstah we're talkin' here.

Alfred Hitchcock's THE RING and BLACKMAIL screen tonight as part of BAM's awesome series The Hitchcock 9. I'm speaking only in title cards tonight in the series' honor.

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Be safe and sound and make sure the next knucklehead is too! July calendar goes live sunday at midnight! It's gonna be a great month for auteur retrospectives, throwback popcorn classics and outdoor movies under the stars. Spread the word, Stockahz! Vive Film!

Joe Walsh

joew@nitratestock.net