About us
As you've probably figured out, since theaters went dark in March, your Classic/Indie Movie Group and your International/Arthouse Movie Meetup Group have joined forces to bring you weekly virtual screenings to enjoy individually, followed by weekly Saturday night ZOOM group discussions. We, your organizers, John, Shirley and Carter are doing our best to make these virtual events happen, and we are thoroughly enjoying ourselves – we hope you can say that too!
Boston has many high-class, non-profit theaters such as the Museum of Fine Arts, the Coolidge Corner, the Harvard Film Archive and the Brattle. They offer movies on demand. Whenever it makes sense, we choose a movie from one of those local venues. In addition, on-demand viewing is increasingly available via on-line rental with Hulu, iTunes, YouTube, Amazon Prime and Google Play. Occasionally, other vendors are a source of good movies, as well.
How This Works
Carter, Shirley and John work together to post a Meetup, early in the week.Rental information is explained in the posting.Members screen the film on their own, during the week.There's typically a 48 hour viewing period, from the time you first hit PLAY. ZOOM discussions occur every Saturday night from 7:20-8:50. To everyone who RSVPs, a ZOOM link will appear in a box to the right of the event page, to be used the night of the discussion. That should cover it, for you. We expect this arrangement to last until the lights come back on in adequately coronavirus-free theaters, at which point we'll address the question of where we go from here. Please feel free to reply to this message with your comments, concerns and suggestions. In the meantime, this is fun! We're really pleased at the attendance we're getting and the thoughtful feedback. Let it continue! We hope to "see" you this Saturday night.
Yours,S, J, & C
Upcoming events
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THE ASPHALT JUNGLE, John Huston (1950) / A swiss-watch heist winds down
·OnlineOnlineIn a smog-choked city somewhere in the American Midwest, an aging criminal mastermind, newly released from prison, hatches a plan for a million-dollar jewel heist and draws a wealthy lawyer and a cherry-picked trio of outlaws into his carefully devised but inevitably doomed scheme. Anchored by an abundance of nuanced performances from a gifted ensemble—including a tight-jawed Sterling Hayden and a sultry Marilyn Monroe in her breakout role—this gritty crime classic by John Huston climaxes in a meticulously detailed anatomy of a robbery that has reverberated through the genre ever since. An uncommonly naturalistic view of a seamy underworld, The Asphalt Jungle painstakingly depicts the calm professionalism and toughness of its gangster heroes while evincing a remarkable depth of compassion for their all-too-human fragility, and it showcases a master filmmaker at the height of his powers. -- Criterion Collection
HOW THIS WORKS
Once you've RSVPed, use these links to rent, stream, or buy The Asphalt Jungle at TV.Movie or JustWatch. View it on your own during the week, then join our Zoom conversation this Saturday 9/26 at 7:20p. Your Zoom link will appear on the upper right of this page. First-timers must RSVP by Friday 9/25 in order to attend.*** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** ***
TRAILER, RATINGS, EXTRAS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXrP6Uo4nUIRotten Tomatoes Tomatometer: 98% of 40 reviews
Metacritic: 85 (universal acclaim) based on 15 reviews, "Must See""Crime is only a left-handed form of human endeavor." -- Alonzo Emmerich
Acknowledgement must be given to Huston's frequent source of inspiration, crime novelist W.R. Burnett, author of Little Caesar and scriptwriter for Scarface. The success of their 1940 collaboration High Sierra enabled Huston to turn to solo directing in 1941's The Maltese Falcon, establishing noir as a genre and Huston as one of its masters.
Helene Stanley, the jitterbugging nymph who transfixes "Doc" Erwin Riedenschneider as the police close in at the film's end, served as Disney's live model for Cinderella, Aurora in Sleeping Beauty, and Anita Radcliffe in One Hundred and One Dalmatians.
Author Eddie Muller, known as the "Czar of Noir," noted that the film "gave an injection of realism to the postwar crime picture," drawing upon the European stylings of Rossellini and De Sica. "Instead of the snarling miscreants seen in hundreds of gangster shoot-'em-ups, The Asphalt Jungle offered an underworld of struggling laborers, alienated loners, even honorable family men—in addition to garden-variety leeches and shysters. These were neorealist thieves, after bigger scores than bicycles."
"It's trash. That Asphalt Pavement thing is full of nasty, ugly people doing nasty things. I wouldn't cross the street to see a picture like that." – Louis B. Mayer, head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, which had just bankrolled Huston's film over his objection
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BLURBS & ATTITUDES
If you want to know where the The Usual Suspects or Reservoir Dogs came from, look no further than this "heist-gone-wrong" movie, John Huston’s greatest noir thriller. Adapted from W.R. Burnett’s pulp novel, it assembles a motley bunch of Midwestern hoods for a "perfect" $1 million diamond robbery, including Sterling Hayden’s hulking hardman, the inimitable Sam Jaffe’s evil mastermind, and Louis Calhern’s duplicitous lawyer ("Some sweet girl," he croons wistfully at the angel on the couch, an iridescent young Marilyn Monroe in one of her first parts). Exciting and tautly directed – the lengthy robbery scenes are exemplary – it’s moody to its dying frame, emphasized by Harold Rosson’s lighting of trash-filled back-alleys and half-lit clip joints and Miklós Rozsa’s haunting theme music. But, although the malaise and moral corruption it describes runs as socially deep as any of Fritz Lang’s noirs, it’s Huston’s irony and his attention to character, the villain’s thwarted professionalism and albeit misguided ambition that deepens it, ensuring the pastoral ending’s pathetic force and emotional kick. ∞ Wally Hammond, Time OutFrom the very first shot, in which the camera picks up a prowling thug, sliding along between buildings to avoid a police car in the gray and liquid dawn, there is ruthless authority in this picture, the hardness and clarity of steel, and remarkably subtle suggestion that conveys a whole involvement of distorted personality and inveterate crime. ∞ Bosley Crowther, The New York Times
The Asphalt Jungle could be understood as a hardening of Huston’s directorial vision, breaking away from Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon and any greater conquest of cool for pathetic men whose minds have gone rotten from being left on the slab for too long ....
Huston often frames these men in obtuse ways, whether from an unusually low angle or with their faces obscured in darkness for long periods of time, which makes The Asphalt Jungle, in terms of visual style, a somewhat conventional noir for its time period. Yet there’s nothing remotely commonplace about Huston’s handling of space between and within scenes, with objects consistently marking three or even four planes of action. Accordingly, the relative flatness of the characters is given counterpoint through their surroundings, which becomes the film’s actual line of inquiry, and renders the jewel heist more of a structuring plot than an end in itself.
This sort of play with directionality and vision marks a shift toward reflexive filmmaking in American cinema but without even a shred of the self-awareness that plagues conscious attempts at genre revision. Huston finds his characters’ fractured selves through implicit suggestions about their trauma, not fragmentary edits or thesis statements as dialogue. The best indication of this tack is evident in The Asphalt Jungle’s smaller scenes. After Dix lets Doll (Jean Hagen) stay over for the night, she greets him the following morning with a cup of coffee, which leads to a discussion of his dreams from the night before. For Dix, dreams are only nightmares, constant reminders of a childhood that includes sudden poverty, his father’s death, and the shooting of his horse. Doll insists that Dix drink his coffee, then begins cleaning the messy apartment. Huston pulls back, stacking two souls atop one another within the frame, highlighting their irreconcilable pain despite their physical proximity and seeming potential to cure what ails the other. ∞ Clayton Dillard, Slant6 attendees
Past events
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