New Print!

A spectacular print made this a major rediscovery of So Dark the Light. The film version of Rod Serling's successful teleplay stars Anthony Quinn as the beaten–up boxer Mountain Rivera in a performance of feral intensity and stumblebum poetry, set to a jazz score. Requiem is a portrait of a cruel dark world where the heart is held ransom to survival, but Jackie Gleason and especially Mickey Rooney are fabulously human as they verbally tussle over their adopted monster Mountain. The most startling character is the gambling boss Ma, master, or mistress, of frightening innuendo and the promise of punishment, a cross between Rod Steiger and Truman Capote and we hope not your mom. Requiem makes film noir existentialism look like a welterweight genre. With cameos by Cassius Clay in his prime and Jack Dempsey in seedy retirement, it announces itself as a quintessential boxing/anti–boxing film, but it is so much more. This is the sixties, see, and things are gonna matter. The fifties are over and you're lucky to walk away with your brains.