How many other people yearn, as I do, for the old, now largely vanished summer tradition of the outdoor movie? They were a highlight of my ’50s childhood in Williams Bay, Wis.: tinny car speakers, crowded refreshment stands, angrily beeping autos and all.
And though old-style outdoor theaters are hard to find, a new version of the experience–“Cinema Under the Stars,” presented by Cinema Chicago (the Chicago Film Festival) and sponsored by Miller Brewing, returns for a second year–kicking off Sunday with a munificent double bill of “Funny Face” and “The Birds.”
Eight other movies will be screened in the series, through Aug. 10, with all showings on Navy Pier’s Skyline Stage overlooking the spectacular Chicago lakefront. If we’re lucky, this may become, like Taste of Chicago or the blues and jazz fests, an annual summer event.
What of this week’s four? Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1963 shocker “The Birds” (11:30 p.m. Sunday), was, like most of his later films, underrated by American critics and hailed by the French. (The French won the argument.) Based, like Hitch’s 1940 “Rebecca,” on a Daphne du Maurier story, it’s the tale of an isolated oceanfront community, Bodega Bay, which comes under mysterious assault by massed flocks of previously harmless non-predatory fowls: sparrows, finches, sea gulls.
The attacks coincide with the arrival in town of a privileged outsider, city girl Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) and, once the raids start, they keep rising in fury and intensity. The movie–a masterpiece of effects, tension, technique and construction–moves, with inexorable authority, from sunny opening to horrific climax. And, though no explanation ever comes for the fine feathered revolt, Hitchcock himself has said “The Birds,” his only pure horror movie, is about the dangers of complacency.
Stanley Donen’s gorgeous 1957 “Funny Face” (9:30 p.m. Sunday), with Fred Astaire, Audrey Hepburn and a superb George and Ira Gershwin score (lifted from their ’20s stage show that also starred Astaire) has all the elements for a great screen musical, except one: a witty script. Leonard Gershe’s screenplay gives us Astaire as a fashion photographer (with photos actually taken by Richard Avedon), Hepburn as a Greenwich Village bookstore clerk turned Paris fashion model and silly gags about existentialism. It’s only mildly amusing. But though the script keeps “Funny Face” from the heights of “Singin’ in the Rain” or “The Band Wagon,” it can’t spoil the elegant fun or rhapsodic dance.
Guiseppe Tornatore’s 1988 “Cinema Paradiso” (9:30 p.m. Tuesday), winner of both the Foreign Language Film Oscar and the Cannes Festival Jury Prize, is a valentine to the movies, focusing, with charm and sentimentality, on the friendship of a Rabelaisian Italian provincial projectionist (Philippe Noiret), and his acolyte, a local boy who grows up into a movie director.
And Stanley Kubrick’s great 1964 end-of-the-world nightmare comedy, “Dr. Strangelove” (10:30 p.m. Monday), with Peter Sellers brilliant in a triple role and Sterling Hayden as the mad general who starts World War III because he’s obsessed with “our precious bodily fluids,” is a quintessential ’60s picture. It’s also, reportedly, Phil Jackson’s favorite film–which proves that the Chicago Bulls coach is as sophisticated and knowledgeable about movies as he is about working the clock and fast breaks.
Tickets for “Cinema Under the Stars” are available at Navy Pier, Ticketmaster or through Cinema Chicago. Call 312-644-3456.
– If you can’t wait for Richard Gere as Sir Lancelot in next week’s new movie, “First Knight,” you can catch Gere’s voice, narrating the world premiere of “Shadow Over Tibet: Voices in Exile” (8 p.m. Friday), at Chicago Filmmakers. A sympathetic portrait of the Tibetan exile community, the movie will be accompanied by representatives of the Tibetan Resettlement Project and film director Rachel Lyon.
Chicago Filmmakers is at 1543 W. Division St. Call 312-384-5533.
– The Ray Harryhausen Tribute at The Music Box, 3733 N. Southport, continues delightfully this weekend with the 1963 mythological adventure “Jason and the Argonauts” (11:30 a.m. Saturday and Sunday). Directed by Don Chaffey, this Hollywood-British retelling of The Argonautica has Todd Armstrong as Jason, Niall MacGinnis as Zeus, Honor Blackman as Hera, dazzling Mediterranean locations, a Bernard Herrmann score conducted by Herrmann, harpies, giant living statues, mermen, seven-headed hydras, the Golden Fleece and a climactic duel with seven sword-slinging skeletons. Some aficionados regard “Jason” as Harryhausen’s finest hour.
Also at The Music Box: the local premiere of another fine Robert Mugge music documentary, “True Believers” (11:30 a.m. Saturday and Sunday), a look at the artists and workers of the independent roots music record company, Rounder. Call 312-871-6604.
