The Cinefamily (Venue Partner)
611 N Fairfax Avenue
323.655.2510
This event has passed.
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Cinefamily
- When
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Friday Apr 23, 2010 (8pm)
- Where
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- Price
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$10
- Links
Ladies of Leisure - 8:00pm
Barbara Stanwyck -- in her first of many roles for Capra -- plays a "party girl" (ahem) who falls for an aspiring and weathy young artist, but whose class distance from him leads to despair. As she works as his model, she slowly sheds her wisecracking, tough-as-nails persona in order to satisfy her need for true love and a normal life. Capra expertly handles their burgeoning love affair with tenderness and building desire, and, perhaps since the film was shot in both silent and sound versions, his visual storytelling carries with it the simplicity and poetry of the silent era. But the real revelation here is a young, then-unknown Stanwyck, whose passionate and forceful performance must have stunned unprepared audiences. As Capra wrote, "Underneath her sullen shyness smoldered the emotional fires of a young Duse, or a Bernhardt -- [T]his chorus girl could grab your heart and tear it to pieces."
Dir. Frank Capra, 1930, 35mm, 99 min.
Forbidden - 9:45pm
"Borrowing the plot of Fannie Hurst’s novel 'Back Street', the classic weepie about a key woman living in secret devotion to a married man, Capra whipped up a story called Forbidden, which reached the screen seven months before Universal’s adaptation Back Street. Replete with covert autobiographical overtones referring not only to Barbara Stanwyck (with whom the director was romantically involved at the time) but also to the other women in his life, including his future wife, Lucille “Lu” Warner Reyburn, from whom Capra borrows the name of Stanwyck’s character, Lulu. Forbidden was a strangely incongruent grab bag of other Capra obsessions, straddling the genres of the soap opera, the newspaper melodrama, and the political exposé. Stanwyck deepens this fascinating concoction with a performance of utter emotional credibility and, at times, startling intensity, especially in the film’s climactic scene." -- Joseph McBride, BAM/PFA
Dir. Frank Capra, 1932, 35mm, 83 min.
View clip : http://www.cinefamily.org/calendar/friday_early.html#forbidden
