This traveling showcase is a grab bag of genres spanning six decades of American cinema, from comedy to melodrama to war film to Western.
Read full descriptionMary Pickford plays a shopgirl in love with a stock clerk who is not what he seems in this charming silent comedy. With Pickford shorts The Son’s Return and A Manly Man.
Adolphe Menjou is delightfully tongue-in-cheek as an aging playboy looking for a new plaything to distract his overeager young wife. With musical short Me and the Boys.
Robert Ryan and Aldo Ray star in Mann’s bleak, gripping take on the Korean conflict. “War on the ground has rarely been done much better than this” (New Yorker).
Charles Boyer plays a priest investigating a purported miracle at a Jesuit seminary in Sirk’s drama of faith and doubt.
Bing Crosby, Cab Calloway, Kate Smith, the Mills Brothers, and other recording stars convene for a musical comedy that is “playful, exuberant, and zany to the max” (LA Times). With musical short Me and the Boys.
Ford’s maritime drama, based on Eugene O’Neill works, follows a freighter whose crew includes John Wayne and Thomas Mitchell. Glorious cinematography by Gregg Toland (Citizen Kane) begs for the big screen.
A New Orleans belle’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy leads to further unintended consequences in this melodrama, an unusually glossy outing from B-movie king Edgar Ulmer.
Introduced by Peter Conheim
Shot on location in rural Ohio, this lost-and-found classic of American independent cinema could be “the missing link between Shadows and The Last Picture Show” (Village Voice).
Double Feature
BAMPFA Student Committee Pick!
A sensational tale of the living dead featuring Bela Lugosi. Followed by The Crime of Doctor Crespi, starring Erich von Stroheim as a sinister surgeon.