For the past 20 years, I have mourned the passage of
revival theaters in New York City. I spent most of the Eighties earning what
was, in effect, a self-taught major in classic films. I hunted down these old
films wherever I could: Theater 80 St. Marks, The Thalia, The Regency, The
Biograph (and even unconventional venues: the Cathedral of St. John the Divine,
with its mighty organ, was a memorable site for Lon Chaney’s silent The Phantom of the Opera). The VCR
radically reduced the number of these temples of cinema, from a dozen to only
about six today in the Big Apple. (I’m sorry: for all the care that host Robert Osborne and
others at Turner Classic Movies lavish on vintage films, these are meant, as
far as I’m concerned, to be viewed as originally intended: on big screens, with audiences sharing the experience in common.)
The way I figure it, if you don’t want to bemoan the
closing of independent bookstores and other embattled cultural touchstones, you
ought to go out and patronize them. And so, when I saw, in a mid-July article in my region’s major daily, The Bergen Record, that New
Jersey had its first repertory theater in who-knows-when, I resolved to see it on
the double.
If you don’t know it already, I’m not going to tell
you the origin of the title of this cinematic outpost in the suburbs, The Rosebud Theater, in Westwood. Instead, I take
pity on you and urge you to start seeing classic cinema, including a certain
one about an early 20th-century press titan that I hope will show up
soon here.
As I discovered from reading several articles online
(including this one from the Record), Rosebud owner Ray Walsh has a
background almost as interesting as his intriguing film lineup. A retired New
York Giants football scout, he had operated another revival theater (also named
the Rosebud) in Ridgewood for a few years in the 1980s (though that was only half the size
of this one). After finding a location on Kinderkamack Road in Westwood that he
deemed favorable, he was briefly blocked by the Westwood Theater until a
settlement was worked out. Part of the agreement is that the Rosebud must run
films at least 10 years old.
Well, the Westwood Theater can have the new films, as far as I’m concerned. They just keep making them dumb and dumber
these days. In contrast, the films made in Hollywood’s Golden Age
of the studio system weren’t made by film-school grads but by men whose first
concern was story. They were creating the language of cinema as they went
along, so their style has a freshness impossible to find nowadays.
So far, the accent at the Rosebud has been on largely on films that
remain enduringly popular, despite (maybe even because of) repeated showings on
TV: West Side Story, Casablanca, Top Hat, and Double Indemnity.
But Walsh has promised to have at least one movie off the beaten track every
month or so. Earlier this year, The Usual
Suspects and The Earrings of Madame
de... would qualify.
But what drew me to the theater finally last weekend
was Alias Nick Beal, a 1949 movie
directed by John Farrow (yes, that’s Mia’s dad—and Maureen O’Sullivan’s
husband). I thought I had seen it 40 years ago on TV, but the details were so
indistinct in my memory that I might as well have seen it for the first time. I was not
disappointed. This overlooked Faustian tale in the film noir genre deserves to be far better known.
Paramount Pictures teamed Farrow once again with several
collaborators from a far better-known film
noir from the year before, The Big
Clock: star Ray Milland, supporting player George Macready, and screenwriter
Jonathan Latimer. Milland, a few years past his Oscar-winning role as an
alcoholic in The Lost Weekend, was
now taking on darker-shaded roles, with his first films—largely comedies that
relied on his easy charm—increasingly a thing of the past.
“Nick Beal” is, in fact, as dark as he could
possibly get—a being who, after materializing at a seedy waterfront dive, appears and disappears virtually at will, always with a sinister
proposition for a listener.
Farrow makes effective use of the moody
cinematography as his Satan slips in and out of the shadows, especially when he
comes in sight of what would be one of his greatest prizes: an honest,
hard-charging D.A., frustrated in bringing down a political boss, who lets slip
out that he would “give my soul if I could nail him.” No sooner said than done.
The process of seduction of the D.A.-turned-politician (played, with his usual mastery, by the nonpareil character actor Thomas Mitchell, best known as Scarlett O'Hara's father in Gone With the Wind) is subtle and step-by-step.
Walsh tries, in a sense, to replicate the experience
of early filmgoing by preceding his main feature with a cartoon or short. He did
an neat bit of programming by pairing Alias
Nick Beal with They’re Always Caught,
an entry in MGM’s 1930s “Crime Doesn’t Pay” series of short films. This
one, focusing on the power of the then-relatively new forensic science, deals
with political corruption—the same subject as Alias Nick Beal. (One character—a crusading district attorney with
political ambitions and a moustache—reminded me of Thomas E. Dewey, then much
in the news for taking on the mob.)
I’m sure the other film aficionados felt as
comfortable in their seats as I did in mine. We should have—Walsh had salvaged
the seats from the old Giants Stadium, just before they were ready to be
discarded.
The Rosebud will have one screening of a feature film
Wednesday and Thursday evenings and two shows for Friday and Saturday nights.
If the programming matches what I saw last week, I’m sure I’ll echo a famous
statement by a certain heavily-accented action hero: “I’ll be back.”
For a number of years, driving through Westwood, NJ,
on Washington Avenue, I have noticed St. Andrew’s Roman Catholic Church. Last weekend, curiosity
finally got the better of me and I took a shot of the exterior..jpg)
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In honor of Flag Day, I have posted this shot, taken last weekend, of the bandshell at Veterans' Park in Westwood NJ, not far from where I live in Bergen County..jpg)
My heart clutches when I see fire department memorials, just as it does when I hear the alarms that call these brave men who rush into harm’s way to save a life. And so, when I
recently noticed this statue by sculptor Idol Brawer, as I approached a traffic
circle in Westwood, NJ, I knew that I had to stop to take this photo.
