Thursdays through July and August, as a sidebar to our Ragged Glory: Summer in the 70s series, we’re casting a (private) eye on crime thrillers, detectives, mystery and suspense.
The series kicks off on July 21 and continues July 28 with two variations on the classic P.I. film: Altman’s The Long Goodbye with Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe, and Jack Nicholson as JJ Gittes in Chinatown.
All tickets $10
Mikey and Nicky
Marked for assassination, lowly gangster Mikey (John Cassavetes) calls his best friend, Nicky (Peter Falk), the only man he can trust, and they deviate around New York City all night, one step ahead of a professional hitman (Ned Beatty).
Taxi Driver
Scorsese's expressionist, hallucinatory rendition of an infernal New York puts us in the head of Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro),"God's lonely man", an insomniac who crisscrosses the city at night and dreams of claiming something better for himself.
The Late Show
Ira (Carney) comes out of retirement when his old partner Harry bleeds to death on his doorstep. What had he been working on? The case of a missing cat... Lily Tomlin, Harry's kooky client, joins forces to unearth the truth - and get her cat back.
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie
Ben Gazzara is Cosmo Vitelli, proud owner of the strip joint Crazy Horse West and in every sense a showman. His fondness for gambling lands him in trouble with the mob, but they offer him an out: all he has to do is murder the eponymous Chinaman...
Saint Jack
Jack Flowers (Ben Gazzara), an American hustler in early 1970s Singapore, dreams of building a fortune by opening a brothel. Bogdanovich's under-seen film has a low-key charm and a great, engaging Gazzara performance.
Mystery Movie
Thursdays through July and August we're casting a (private) eye on crime thrillers, detectives, mystery and suspense. And we're setting the Crime Scene with a mystery: a secret surprise screening of a starry, fiendishly clever 1970s film of this genre.
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The Long Goodbye
Altman's jaundiced update of Raymond Chandler to the 1970s stars a mumbly Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe, caught up in a case of personal betrayal. This cool, sour comedy (scripted by Leigh Brackett, who wrote The Big Sleep) inspired PTA's Inherent Vice.
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The Yakuza
East meets West, Ken Takakura meets Robert Mitchum in this flawed but intriguing attempt to marry film noir and yakuza traditions, cooked up by screenwriter brothers Paul and Leonard Schrader (who would later collaborate on the script for Raging Bull).
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Night Moves
Arthur Penn's neo-noir classic takes the private eye genre to the point of no-return: Gene Hackman's Harry Moseby is completely out of his depth in a case he never really understands. "A key film of the 70s... Essential viewing." Time Out
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