August 15th 2013. Pick Of The Day.

Michelangelo Antonioni's L'AVVENTURA, the film that made the director's name on the world cinema stage, screens for the second of its three day run as part of MoMA's excellent Auteurist History of Film series. I made passionate love to Monica Vitti last month when the film had its run at the Film Forum, so I need my space from the gorgeous Italian actress, said no one ever. Still, this was so recently my Pick I have to forego its charms this day in favor of something new. She'll forgive.

Speaking of the Forum their geekgasm series Son Of Summer Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror, an exhaustive ode to the B-movies of the past that inspired the A-list megabudget popcorn flicks of the present, delivers to its faithful Edward L. Cahn's IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE and Ridley Scott's ALIEN. Both seminal works of sci-fi horror, albeit of differing quality, yet both had a groundbreaking antecedent, one which perhaps first mashed up the two genres and influenced the future Hollywood Brats of the 70's in a variety of ways. More on that later. In the meantime watch the skies.

Also at the Forum D.W. Griffith's INTOLERANCE continues to inspire awe in its newly spit-shined DCP incarnation. The ambitious apology for BIRTH OF A NATION remains a touchstone of the cinema with few peers, but as I said yesterday; love it, chose it, skipping it.

Uptown at the Walter Reade Theater the Film Society's Fasten Your Seatbelts (Part 2): 20th Century Fox trots out Anatole Litvak's ANASTASIA and John Hough's DIRTY MARY CRAZY LARRY. One of these films is a NASCAR fan's wet dream. Guess which?

Back downtown at Anthology Film Archives one series continues while a second gets underway. Cine-Simenon, their trib to screen adaps of the works of novelist Georges Simenon, unspools Henry Hathaway's THE BOTTOM OF THE BOTTLE, featuring Joseph Cotten as a lawyer/rancher trying to smuggle his escaped convict/alcoholic brother across the border to his wife. Meanwhile WILD GALS OF THE NAKED WEST and MOTOR-PSYCHO screen as part of their Russ Meyer retrospective The Glandscape Artist. Gosh I wish I was that clever. Both tempt, but a true master is repped by one of his most influential works today, and I'm actually gonna pass up a plethora of flopping breasts in favor of an electrocuted carrot, which would and should serve as synopisis for an entirely different low-budget crime. Hello, Asylum?

Outdoor screenings, which are increasingly dwindling, include this evening John G. Avildsen's ROCKY at Brooklyn Bridge Park and Big Al's NORTH BY NORTHWEST in Queens' Cunningham Park. Not that I'da picked either tonight against the clear winner but it's also October weather out there. A summer outdoor screening should include one crucial ingredient; summer. So place the blame squarely on August's shoulders for the snub. It'll never learn otherwise.

So what have I made my Pick today?

Some of you might know how I feel about a certain Howard Winchester Hawks.

Should ya not know or even be clueless about his CV Hawks was a maverick of the cinema, a major filmmaker of the studio era who never became a contract director and more often than not served as his own producer. Thus freed from the constraints most of his contemporaries chafed beneath he simply followed his instincts from project to project, which were in turn inspired by new talent discovered (Monty Clift, Lauren Bacall), genres to be defined (the gangster film, the screwball comedy), or convention overturned, for which his creation of the Hawksian Woman, the strongest female character to be found on film in the wake of the suppresive Hays code, served as ultimate example. What Hawks really loved though above all else was a good story well told, no matter the genre it belonged to. His formula for a great film? " Three great scenes. No bad ones." So when he came across an exceedingly inventive short story in Astounding Stories magazine in 1938, an early indentity paranoia thriller titled Who Goes There?, he immediately snapped up the rights, waiting for the proper moment to crack this new science fiction genre like he'd cracked every other. It would take a decade, but he'd get there.

Christian Nyby Jr. had served as Hawks' editor on several projects, including THE BIG SLEEP and RED RIVER, and the director had promised his cutter the opportunity to oversee his own film one day, one Hawks himself would produce. Hawks' uncanny knack for predicting or even informing the public taste had almost never let him down, and in 1951 he dusted off the short story he'd purchased 13 years earlier perhaps sensing the Red Scare paranoia that would define the cinematic decade. Early attempts to replicate the story's shape-shifting beastie met with poor FX tests, and Hawks, ultimately calling the shots, eschewed the idea in favor of an otherworldy combo of Frankenstein's monster and Dracula, a hulking lurking mass of vegetable matter thirsty for human blood. As pre-production wore on it became clear that Hawks was relinquishing the director's chair for the sake of the credits only, allowing his trusted editor to attain DGA membership, and by everyone's account from the set it was the Grey Fox himself who tackled this insanely influential work of the cinema. As I've said, both the sci-fi/horror genre mashup and 50's sci-fi Red Scare films come from this single source, but what's perhaps more important is Hawks' devout focus on professionalism above all, the ultimate guy flick trope. Boys will be boys (even the women in a Hawks flick are "one of the boys"), and among the boys who first watched this flick whence released number Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and a cat named John Carpenter who succeeded in remaking his fave flick, cranking out a classic in its own right, but, quite like his eponymous alien monstrosity, failing in the replication of the original.

Howard Hawks' THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD screens today at the Film Forum as part of their Son of Summer Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror series. The ultimate Vegan revenge fable. And this would piss its maker off to no end.

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Be safe and sound and make sure the next knucklehead is too! Back tomorrow with yet another Pick. Til then wake me if August decides to show up. Zzzzzzz

-Joe Walsh

joew@nitratestock.net