Admission $2.50
Ben Hecht wrote, produced and directed this rare Hollywood “art film” of the '40s, a drama about insanity and artistic intensity behind the scenes in the world of ballet. Judith Anderson and Michael Chekhov star as an aging teacher and her impresario who become engaged in protecting a young ballerina (Viola Essen) from her demented husband (Ivan Kirov), who was suspected of murdering his first wife and seems destined to repeat the act in a dance ritual of his own invention. UCLA film archivist Charles Hopkins writes, “Hecht's Specter of the Rose turned out to be one of the most truly unusual Hollywood films of the 1940s--something which should come as no surprise to anyone who remembers Crime Without Passion (1934) and The Scoundrel (1935), Hecht's earlier films produced in collaboration with Charles MacArthur and cameraman Lee Garmes. The devotion to Art professed by the characters in Specter of the Rose might have seemed indecent in its fervor, except that Hecht undercut the whole idea by having the loftiest sentiments expressed by Lionel Stander in a reprise of his role as a gravel-voiced poet in The Scoundrel.”