INSPIRATIONAL LIVES: BIOGRAPHICAL FILMS ABOUT EXTRAORDINARY INDIVIDUALS

Wednesdays, July 9-August 6, 2014 - 1:00 PM
Barrington Library Auditorium

The first day of summer has already come and gone, and as we put graduations and Father's Day celebrations behind us, and look forward to enjoying fresh strawberries during their all-too brief season as the Fourth of July fast approaches, it's a good time to start planning our recreational activities for the season. Picnics anyone? A swim in the ocean or a refreshing sailboat cruise? Attendance at a baseball game? There are so many possibilities for enjoyment during a time of year that can seem as fleeting as the "in season" for strawberries that I mentioned above.

I've got one more recommendation for you. Why not seek solace from the heat and humidity and join me on five consecutive Wednesday afternoons in the air-conditioned comfort of the Barrington Library auditorium, for a movie lecture series called Inspirational Lives: Biographical Films About Extraordinary Individuals?

I've gathered a handful of films that look at individuals who faced challenges and obstacles in their lives: the blind deaf-mute Helen Keller, who learned to thrive once her dedicated teacher, Annie Sullivan, broke through the barriers that isolated the girl (The Miracle Worker); Sir Thomas More, who followed his conscience by refusing to endorse King Henry VIII's plan to separate from the Roman Catholic Church--exemplifying the principle of "the courage of one's convictions" (A Man For All Seasons).

Karen Blixen, a Danish woman who wrote under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen, endured the infidelities of her husband, and years of hard work trying to run a successful coffee plantation in early 20th-century Kenya (Out of Africa); James Braddock was a Depression-era light heavyweight boxing contender whose career seemed to be derailed by an injury, until fate gave him a second chance (Cinderella Man).

And then there's Johnny Cash, who rose from humble beginnings in Arkansas to a career as arguably one of the greatest country music performers of our time, dealing with all of the temptations and pitfalls that can come with fame, including drug dependency and infidelity (Walk the Line).

Like all of us, these men and women had to find their own way, in a world that often dealt them cruel blows. That they were able to surmount these travails serves as a testament to the strength of the human spirit. Self-determination. Courage. When necessary, the willingness to let others help us.These are all traits that, hopefully, we can find within ourselves.

Let's make a date to meet in the library's auditorium. One o'clock. Wednesdays. Together, let's be inspired by the lives that we see depicted up on the screen.

Doug Swiszcz
Librarian & Film Enthusiast

Here's the rundown:

July  9 - The Miracle Worker - Patty Duke, Anne Bancroft. (1962 - Black & white - 106 min. - unrated)

July 16 - A Man For All Seasons - Paul Scofield, Robert Shaw, Wendy Hiller, Orson Welles. (1966 - Color - 120 min. - unrated)

July 23 - Out of Africa - Meryl Streep, Robert Redford. (1985 - Color - 161 min. - rated PG, for sexuality, profanity, violence involving animals, and smoking and drinking)

July 30 - Cinderella Man - Russell Crowe, Renee Zellweger, Paul Giamatti. (2005 - Color - 144 min. - rated PG-13, for intense boxing violence and some language)

Aug.  6 - Walk the Line - Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon. (2005 - Color - 136 min. - rated PG-13, for language, thematic material, and depiction of drug dependency)

Ingrid Bergman: A Celebration

A Film Lecture Series - Wednesdays at 1 PM, March 5, 12, 19, 26 and April 2, 2014

Hello All,
What a winter it's been. Cold weather made more intolerable by a seemingly endless barrage of snow and ice. Those who ski must be quite happy. Those who lean more towards sitting in a window seat, sipping a cup of warm cocoa are content to remain indoors. Please include me in the latter group.

But spring is (hopefully) just around the corner. March will be here before you know it, and each day is getting a little longer. In the meantime, one way to beat the winter doldrums is to attend my latest film lecture series.

I'm saluting a female Swedish movie star of yesteryear. No, not Garbo. The other one:
Ingrid Bergman. Hollywood producer David O. Selznick saw her in a Swedish film and brought her over to America in the late thirties, where she was signed to a contract.

Her exquisite beauty and singular acting style made her the darling of both the critics and the public for a time. However, events in her private life--she left her first husband and their child for neo-realist Italian director Roberto Rossellini in the early 1950s--made the public turn on her. She was even denounced on the floor of Congress for her indiscretions.

But time heals all wounds, and--after several years living with Rossellini and their children in Rome--Bergman returned from her exile to star in Anastasia on the American movie screen. Apparently all was forgiven, for she was awarded with the Best Actress Oscar for her performance in that film.

I've selected a handful of Ms. Bergman's movies that I hope will serve as a fitting celebration of her work, allowing us to appreciate her anew.

Even those who don't necessarily like old movies must nevertheless be familiar with Bergman's work in Casablanca. This World War II era romance film, in which Bergman and Humphrey Bogart agree that, in memory, they'll "always have Paris," is a Hollywood classic. And if you are a classic film fan, you'll swoon again to the strains of "As Time Goes By," the movie's theme song.

Bergman etched for us a portrait of a woman driven to the brink of insanity in Gaslight, in which she plays a new bride who starts to experience disconcerting things once she begins living with her new husband (Charles Boyer). What's behind these strange events--and can they be stopped before Bergman falls over the precipice into madness?

Spellbound is one of three films that Bergman made with director Alfred Hitchcock (who, as he did with so many of his leading ladies, felt unrequited love for her). This one casts the actress as a clinically cold psychoanalyst who tries to help an amnesiac accused of murder, and finds herself falling in love with him in the process. Gregory Peck is her co-star.

In Anastasia, the film with which she was welcomed back into the good graces of America, Bergman plays a woman who claims to be daughter of deposed Russian Emperor Nicholas II. Supposedly the entire royal family was killed by the Bolsheviks in 1917...but did she somehow escape the overthrow? Yul Brynner and Helen Hayes co-star.

Finally, we'll see Bergman in The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, playing a missionary in charge of a roadside hostel in remote China, who must endure the invasion of the area by the Japanese. Based on true events, it's the story of a woman forced to summon her inner strength to face great external turmoil.

I am looking forward to getting this series underway--and to seeing all of you again.

The auditorium, second floor of the library. I'll be there.

Doug Swiszcz

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Here's the series at a quick glance:

March  5 - Casablanca 

March 12 - Gaslight

March 19 - Spellbound

March 26 - Anastasia

April  2 -    The Inn of the Sixth Happiness

THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT: A SPINE-TINGLING FILM LECTURE SERIES

Wednesdays at 1:00 PM -- October 2, 9, 16, 23 and 30, 2013

Autumn is nearly upon us, a time when the air turns crisper, when one can smell burning leaves in the distance, and when the days grow shorter. Or perhaps I should say, when the nights grow longer.

October is, of course, the month of Halloween, an annual tradition that evokes memories of childhoods past, of ghosts and goblins and witches cackling in the moonlight. Our passage into adulthood may force us into wingtips and high heels, but do we ever truly leave behind the thrill that comes from being scared out of our wits? Perhaps there's some primal urge in us that makes us squeal with delight from being frightened. How else do we explain the fun of sitting around the campfire and telling chilling stories?

I thought that I would devote my Fall 2013 film lecture series, Things That Go Bump in the Night, to movies that tap into our primal urges, our primal fears.

Anyone who knows my love of film is aware that I gravitate toward older movies, or at least toward those that are similar in style to those made during what has been often called the golden age of cinema. You have to know that the last thing that I would do is to inundate you with gratuitous blood and gore. I prefer the tack of showing films that build suspense, that lay out before you an evolving story that will increase your sense of unease or, perhaps, of dread. It's often not what is shown, but rather what is implied, that scares the dickens out of us.

Although the movies that I am presenting this fall  will be screened in the early afternoon, once the lights are turned down and the films begin, we'll be alone in the dark--collectively, that is. So bring a friend or a significant other with you, someone whose arm you can grasp when something on the screen suddenly makes your heart race or sends chills down your spine.

I look forward to seeing you in October when, together, we can rekindle our childhood fascination with things that go bump in the night...

Doug Swiszcz

Librarian & Film Enthusiast

The schedule:

Oct. 2nd: Psycho - Janet Leigh, who's absconded with some money from work, makes the mistake of checking into the Bates Motel in this Hitchcock classic. Co-starring Anthony Perkins. (1960 - B&W - 109 min. - Unrated)

Oct. 9th: The Innocents - Deborah Kerr is a governess who fears that her young charges are possessed by the spirits of a former governess and her sadistic lover. Based on Henry James' The Turn of the Screw. (1961 - B&W - 100 min. -- Unrated)

Oct. 16th: Rosemary's Baby - Mia Farrow is a young mother-to-be who comes to suspect that her husband and neighbors are involved in a nefarious plot concerning the baby. With John Cassavetes and Ruth Gordon. (1968 - Color - 136 min. - Rated R for profanity, a dream sequence involving sexuality, and frightening sequences)

Oct. 23rd: Dead Again - A Los Angeles cop (Kenneth Branagh) helps an amnesiac (EmmaThompson) to recover her memory with the aid of a hypnotherapist, but past life regressions reveal a disturbing link between the two of them. (1991 - Color - 107 min. - Rated R for language and violence)

Oct. 30th: The Others - A woman (Nicole Kidman) who lives with her two photosensitive children in a darkened old house fears that it may be haunted. (2001 - Color - 104 min. - Rated PG-13 for thematic elements and frightening sequences)

A Slice of Lemmon

A Jack Lemmon Summer Matinee Film Series

Wed., July 10-31, 2013 - 1:00
Library Auditorium

Hello Friends,

Summer has rolled around once again, and as I sit here composing this blog entry, the weather outside is hot and muggy. I know that the expression "dog days of summer" is normally used much later in the season, but I'm panting like a member of the canine family even now. I don't normally seek out the sun and heat during the summer. The hole in the ozone isn't getting any smaller, and I've always felt that it is not worth the effort to slather myself with sunscreen. For what? To then lie on a towel and sweat?

Why don't you join me in the cool comfort of the library's auditorium for my July film lecture series, saluting Jack Lemmon? I thought that I'd show a handful of Lemmon's comedic movies, even though we all know that he was a dramatic actor of distinction as well. But it's summer, after all. So I thought that I'd "serve up" something light and refreshing--namely, a slice of Lemmon.

We'll get to enjoy Jack's first feature film role, as a young filmmaker who takes a liking to dizzy blonde Judy Holliday, in It Should Happen to You. Directed by the esteemed George Cukor, the film looks at our culture's preoccupation with fame and celebrity. This movie opened in 1954--nearly a decade and a half before Andy Warhol spoke about everyone eventually getting their own fifteen minute of fame. Talk about being prescient!

Who doesn't love Some Like It Hot, the Billy Wilder-directed classic with Lemmon and Tony Curtis as two musicians in 1920's Chicago who disguise themselves as women to evade gangsters whose mob slaying they have witnessed. Here we have Lemmon the farceur on display, as his character gets caught up perhaps a bit too much in the pleasures of his masquerade. And the film has Marilyn Monroe at her breathless, jiggly best.

Wilder also directed The Apartment, with Lemmon playing the kind of role at which he would come to excel: the little man, lost in the sea of humanity, but trying desperately to carve out a niche for himself. Here, he's a small cog in the wheel at an insurance agency, who lends his apartment to his philandering bosses for their trysts. But is this the best way to climb the ladder to success, if it means compromising your self-respect? Shirley Maclaine co-stars.

We close the series with The Odd Couple, based on Neil Simon's successful Broadway play (and forerunner to the long-running Tony Randall-Jack Klugman TV series). One of several films that Lemmon made with Walter Matthau, it pairs the two as mismatched roommates, one a neurotic fussbudget, the other  a sloppy sportswriter. Lemmon's performance is filled with tics,wheezes, and just about anything else that could drive Matthau to distraction. And does. 

Come in from the stifling heat and join me for a good laugh this summer, watching an actor who stands as one of the exemplars of comedic acting. A chuckle, after all, is better than a sunburn.

Doug Swiszcz

Librarian and Film Enthusiast

Here's the schedule, at a glance:

July 10 - It Should Happen to You - 1954 - Black & white - 86 min. - not rated.

July 17 - Some Like It Hot - 1959 - Black & white - 120 min. - not rated.

July 24 - The Apartment - 1960 - Black & white - 125 min. - not rated.

July 31 - The Odd Couple - 1968 - Color - 105 min. - rated G.

Audrey in the Afternoon: A Film Lecture Series
Wednesdays at 1:00 PM, May 1 through June 5, 2013

I barely have to even mention her last name, right? Who among us was immune to the charms of Miss Hepburn, the bewitching, beguiling beauty with the petite frame and the big eyes? She was the perfect example of what a movie star was back in the days of classic films.

I'll be honoring Audrey in my latest film series for six consecutive Wednesdays at 1:00 PM, beginning May 1st.

From her first American movie, Roman Holiday, in 1953, for which she won the Best Actress Academy Award, this waif-like performer entered into a love affair with the public--a love affair that would last until her untimely death from cancer in 1993.

A drab bookstore clerk who becomes the toast of Paris high fashion in Funny Face. A young Belgian woman who decides to enter a convent in The Nun's Story. Manhattan socialite Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle, transformed into the belle of the ball courtesy of Professor 'enry 'iggins in My Fair Lady. A young widow whose husband left behind a large sum of money in Charade (paired with Cary Grant). These are just some of the highlights of her career, in my opinion.

Would you ever guess that Audrey didn't think that she was particularly attractive? Or that she was very honest in admitting that her talents as an actress were acquired in piecemeal fashion, as she moved from one role to another? That she prized family enough to put her film career on hold for more than half a decade? All true.

Come rediscover the magic of Audrey Hepburn on the big screen. I can assure you that you'll fall in love with her all over again.

Doug Swiszcz
Librarian and Film Enthusiast

The lineup:
May 1st - Roman Holiday - with Gregory Peck - Black & white - 118 minutes

May 8th - Funny Face - with Fred Astaire, Kay Thompson - Color - 103 minutes

May 15th - The Nun's Story - Color - 149 minutes

May 22nd - Breakfast at Tiffany's - with George Peppard, Patricia Neal - Color - 115 minutes

May 29th - My Fair Lady - with Rex Harrison - Color - 3 hours, with one 15-minute intermission

June 5th - Charade - with Cary Grant - Color - 113 minutes

FOND OF FONDA: A MOVIE MATINEE LECTURE SERIES
Wednesdays at 2:00 PM
March 6, 13, 20, 27, and April 3, 2013

Hello Again-
It seems like forever since I've hosted a film lecture series at the Library. This time out, I thought that I'd salute one of our most revered actors from the cinema of yesteryear with a Henry Fonda series.
Fonda, with his tall, thin frame and reedy, midwestern-tinged voice, epitomized a kind of grace and quiet intelligence. Conscientious. Morally upstanding. Given to deliberation before offering his thoughts on an issue (and then speaking with that distinctively sloooow pace). A winning personifcation of the common man.

And yet there always seemed to be something else that percolated beneath the surface--a darker, deeper side that was not wholly scrutable. If Henry Fonda faced demons, he faced them alone. For a man who chose a profession in which communication is vital, Fonda was emotionally buttoned down in his private life. He was married five times; his children Peter and Jane found him remote. To him, life was about moving beyond your failures and disappointments, perhaps about rising above them.

But what Fonda couldn't express privately, he used in his art. Sometimes his characters were plain spoken; at other times, what was hidden behind that look in his eyes added complexity and nuance to his performances.

The films of Fonda's that I plan on showing include his career-defining role as Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, in which he evinced a kind of resilience in the face of personal misfortune. Then there's young Henry as the naive, much put-upon heir to a brewery fortune who falls prey to Barbara Stanwyck in director Preston Sturges' screwball comedy The Lady Eve. Fonda reunited with his Grapes of Wrath director, John Ford, to portray Wyatt Earp in all of his principled glory in My Darling Clementine. The actor that we've come to equate with the voice of reason tries to face down dissenting jurors in 12 Angry Men. Finally, the series wraps up not with a theatrically-released motion picture, but with a videotaped performance for television of Fonda in his one-man, tour de force portrayal of famed lawyer Clarence Darrow.

I look forward to seeing you all at the beginning of March.

Doug Swiszcz

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Here's the rundown (all are Wednesday showings that begin at 2:00 PM):

March 6th: The Grapes of Wrath - 1940, black & white, 129 minutes, unrated.

March 13th: The Lady Eve - 1941, black & white, 94 minutes, unrated.

March 20th: My Darling Clementine - 1946, black & white, 97 minutes, unrated.

March 27th: 12 Angry Men - 1957, black & white, 96 minutes, unrated.

April 3rd: Clarence Darrow - 1974, color, 81 minutes, unrated.

Gotta Sing! Gotta Dance! The Evolution of the Movie Musical

A Film Lecture Series Presented by Librarian Doug Swiszcz 

 

 Wednesdays, September 26-October 31, 2012 at 1:00 PM

Barrington Public Library

We're all familiar with the image: a euphoric Gene Kelly, so happy that he is in love that--inclement weather be dashed--he just has to sing and dance in the street. Pouring rain can't dampen his spirits; that's how effusive his feelings are.

On the stage, song and dance are an accepted means of expression.  What about song and dance in the movies? Film is a more natural, realistic medium--worlds removed from the artifice and high degree of stylization that we think nothing of when we experience live performance.

But once the technology of talking pictures came about, movie makers attempted to wed the artifice of the one medium with the naturalism of the other. It was definitely a growth process. Early movie musicals were often revue-style productions that featured singers and dancers performing "face out,"  as if they were on a proscenium stage, in a Broadway theater. Many early movie musicals, in fact, revolved around a "let's put on a show" story, as if the only way that filmgoers would readily accept the idea of people breaking into song and dance was if these "numbers" took place on stage within the movie.

Movie musicals really started coming into their own when song and dance were used in a cinematic way, with a camera that incorporated their rhythm and movement to advance the story, or to reveal characters' feelings. In the film that opens my series, Love Me Tonight (1932), the Rodgers and Hart song "Isn't It Romantic" is introduced by a tailor (Maurice Chevalier) in the city of Paris, and is then taken up by other characters, through various means of transportation, to the countryside, where we find it being sung by a lovely princess (Jeanette MacDonald). Here, we see music used as a means of linking two disparate characters--the lowly city tailor and the high-born princess in her country chateau.

Of course, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers used song and dance as a kind of "courtship ritual" in the many movies that they made together--he wooed, she initially demurred, but in the end they ended up in each others' arms.We'll see such a love story told through dance to a tuneful Irving Berlin score in Top Hat (1935).

Musicals written specifically for the screen were quite common in the hey day of movie musicals--and no studio excelled at this form better than MGM, thanks to a creative and technical team headed up by producer Arthur Freed. And with talents like Judy Garland and Gene Kelly--whose films Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) and Singin' in the Rain (1952), respectively, will be shown as part of this series--how could they go wrong?

As the golden age of the Hollywood musical started to decline in the late fifties and early sixties, we saw movie studios increasingly turning to Broadway properties to transfer to the screen (for fear that audiences would not come to a movie musical unless the show already have a proven track record on stage). Some of these adaptations were quite successful, but many of them were unimaginative transcriptions of their stage version. Like the early movie musicals, these movies were staged and filmed in such a way that the casts might as well have been up on a proscenium stage. Where was the cinematic expression that could enliven these properties? Of course, not all such adaptations were so static and "stagey." The film version of Fiddler on the Roof (1971) presented a robust adaptation of a smash Broadway musical.

As tastes in popular music changed, Hollywood musicals all but died out. Younger film audiences, raised on rock music, were less likely to be captivated by characters bursting into song up on the screen. But director Rob Marshall found a way to adapt the Broadway musical Chicago (2002) into a film so that it appealed to these younger moviegoers. The snappy, savvy movie went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture in the year of its release--the first film musical to earn that accolade in over 30 years.

I hope that you will join me for this look at the evolution of the movie musical.

I look forward to seeing you there.

Doug Swiszcz

The line-up:

Sept 26^th Love Me Tonight (1932) -- Black & white -- 89 minutes -- Unrated.

Oct  3^rd  Top Hat (1935)  -- Black & white -- 101 minutes -- Unrated.

Oct 10^th  Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) -- Color -- 113 minutes -- Unrated.

Oct. 17^th  Singin’ in the Rain (1952) -- Color -- 103 minutes -- Unrated.

Oct. 24^th Fiddler on the Roof (1971) -- Color -- 181 minutes -- Rated G.

Oct 31^st  Chicago (2002) -- Color -- 113 minutes -- Rated PG-13.