Current Season
How do you weigh the cultural heritage of a nation against the value of human life? That’s the subtext of The Train, a wholly persuasive, intelligent thiller crisply directed by John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate) with documentary-like realism and emphasis on action and problem-solving.
[For more, click on FILM NOTES below]
In Alfred Hitchcock’s most quick-witted and devilish comic thriller, the beautiful Margaret Lockwood, traveling across Europe by train, meets a charming spinster who then seems to disappear into thin air. The younger woman turns investigator and finds herself drawn into a complex web of mystery and high adventure. Also starring Michael Redgrave, The Lady Vanishes remains one of the great filmmaker’s purest delights.
The Criterion Collection
In this programme we're also showing
NIGHT MAIL
GPO Film Unit | Harry Watt / Basil Wright | 1936 | UK | 23 | mins | BW
See separate entry
[For more, click on FILM NOTES below]
This film is programmed to be shown together with The Lady Vanishes
Arguably the GPO Film Unit’s most famous and acclaimed title, Night Mail is a 1936 documentary film featuring a journey by a London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) mail train from London to Glasgow. A poem by English poet W. H. Auden was commissioned especially for the closing few minutes of the film, and the music was composed by Benjamin Britten, at that time a virtual unknown.
Fritz Lang's 1954 American version of the Zola novel (and Renoir film) La bete humaine. Gloria Grahame, at her brassiest, pleads with Glenn Ford to do away with her slob of a husband, Broderick Crawford. Lang mines the railroad setting for a remarkably rich series of visual correlatives to his oppressively Catholic conception of guilt and retribution. A gripping melodrama, marred only by Ford's inability to register an appropriate sense of doom.
Excerpt of Dave Kehr's review at the Chicago Reader
[For more, click on FILM NOTES below]