Illustrated Lecture by Russell Merritt. Merritt's colorful talk illuminates the evolution of '50s aesthetics. Followed at 5:40 by a screening of French Revolution melodrama Scaramouche, in which even bloodstains become decorator accents.
Introduced by Russell Merritt. John Huston brought Jose Ferrer to his knees for this lavish Toulouse-Lautrec biopic, a classic of the suffering-artist genre. The film's vision of Lautrec's Montmartre took Technicolor in a newly nuanced direction.
Introduced by Russell Merritt. Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Shirley MacLaine in Vincente Minnelli's melodrama of a dissolute writer returned from war to the drab small town of his youth. The bravura finale turns an actual Midwestern town into a CinemaScope hallucination.