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Parker Posey in Daisy von Scherler Mayer's Party Girl. Of NYC in the '90s, Posey says, "There was such community back then, without it feeling like 'community'—it was more like 'the scene' or 'nightlife,' and you could run into people on the streets that you'd seen out dancing."Movie-lovers!Welcome back to The Deuce Notebook, a collaboration between Mubi's Notebook and The Deuce Film Series, a monthly 35mm event at Nitehawk Williamsburg that excavates the facts and fantasies of cinema's most infamous block in the world: 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues.This month, we celebrate Daisy von Scherler Mayer’s Party Girl, the quintessential centerpiece of Parker Posey’s prolific ’90s oeuvre. Originally released in June 1995, the film inspired Vanity Fair contributor Michael Musto to crown Posey “the new queen of the art house.”A slightly overdue existential crisis befalls Posey’s street-savvy,...

Surreal delirium in cinema! Gary Cooper and Ann Harding are a tragic romantic pair, but even when separated by space, time and the law they manage to live a full life together as virtual dream lovers. The odd art film out in Henry Hathaway’s career, this unabashed spiritualist fantasy was adopted by French surrealists as emblematic of their values. It’s beautifully filmed by cameraman Charles Lang, avoiding overdone expressionist effects… reality is a dream, folks, and this star-crossed pair makes dreams real by a simple force of will. Spiritual Nirvana or pretension? It’s crazy, but it connects with real life as we experience it — with our romantic memories and regrets.

Peter Ibbetson

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1935 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 85 min. / Street Date August 10, 2021 / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95

Starring: Gary Cooper, Ann Harding, Ida Lupino, John Halliday, Dickie Moore, Virginia Weidler, Douglass Dumbrille, Donald Meek, Leonid Kinskey,...

Marriage, social pressure, professional disappointment — and if you want to be really unhappy, add alcohol to that mix. Fredric March and Sylvia Sidney are convincing sophisticates but also vulnerable people negotiating fragile lives. What can be done when one’s mate is dissolving in booze and drawn to the arms of another? Dorothy Arzner’s best picture shows us a woman who won’t give up on her marriage, for the right reasons. It’s a serious and adult pre-Code drama, the kind that sounds more salacious than it is. Sylvia Sydney crafts a portrait of a fine woman under pressure, who maintains her dignity even in an attempt at an ‘open marriage.’ The unusual title is a light-hearted toast reflecting inner despair. The disc comes with excellent extras on director Dorothy Arzner.

Merrily We Go to Hell

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 1076

1932 / B&w / 1:37 flat Academy / 83 min. / available through...

Billy Wilder directed Sunset Blvd. with Gloria Swanson and William Holden. Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett movies Below is a list of movies on which Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder worked together as screenwriters, including efforts for which they did not receive screen credit. The Wilder-Brackett screenwriting partnership lasted from 1938 to 1949. During that time, they shared two Academy Awards for their work on The Lost Weekend (1945) and, with D.M. Marshman Jr., Sunset Blvd. (1950). More detailed information further below. Post-split years Billy Wilder would later join forces with screenwriter I.A.L. Diamond in movies such as the classic comedy Some Like It Hot (1959), the Best Picture Oscar winner The Apartment (1960), and One Two Three (1961), notable as James Cagney's last film (until a brief comeback in Milos Forman's Ragtime two decades later). Although some of these movies were quite well received, Wilder's later efforts – which also included The Seven Year Itch...

Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. To Be or Not to Be is playing on Mubi in the Us through August 28.In 2002, the American Film Institute selected To Be or Not to Be as one of the 50 funniest American movies of all time. In March of 1942, when the film was initially released, most critics weren't laughing. A movie lampooning Adolf Hitler may have been acceptable a few years prior (see, for example, Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator [1940], though even then Chaplin began to regret his decision after learning more of the Nazis' "homicidal insanity"). But by 1942, Pearl Harbor had been attacked, America had entered World War II, and, to make matters even more dour, the star of To Be or Not to Be, the radiant Carole Lombard, had died in a plane crash less than two months before the premiere. All told, those...

‘Midnight Madness’ movie lacks both ‘midnight’ and ‘madness’ (photo: Clive Brook and Jacqueline Logan in ‘Midnight Madness’) Screened at the 2014 San Francisco Silent Film Festival, Midnight Madness has a very curious title: there is no "midnight" or "madness" to be found in the film. The story’s original name, The Lion Trap, from a play by Daniel Nathan Rubin, would have been a much more appropriate title. Norma (Jacqueline Logan, best known as Mary Magdalene in Cecil B. DeMille’s The King of Kings) lives in a squalid apartment behind a shooting gallery, with her good-for-nothing father (James Bradbury). She goes to work each day as a secretary at a Diamond Broker Company, looking forward to romantic trysts with her boss, Childers (Walter McGrail). Norma takes the relationship seriously, but Childers is a schemer. When wealthy client Richard Bream (Clive Brook, best known for the Best Picture Academy Award winner...

On March 12, 2009 at 7:00 p.m., The Collegiate Chorale appears with The New York City Opera Orchestra at the newly renovated Alice Tully Hall in a performance of Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin's 1945 Broadway operetta The Firebrand of Florence. The performance, led by guest conductor Ted Sperling, stars baritone Nathan Gunn, soprano Anna Christy, baritone Terrence Mann, and soprano Victoria Clark. Krysty Swann, David Pittu and Patrick Goss complete the cast, and narration will be provided by Stage Director Roger Rees. Boasting a score by Kurt Weill, lyrics by Ira Gershwin, and a book by playwright and screenwriter Edwin Justus Mayer, The Firebrand of Florence had a short run on Broadway in 1945. The work was subsequently not heard for over a half-century until three presentations - Ohio Light Opera (1999), the BBC Symphony Orchestra in London (2000) and the Radio Symphony Orchestra in Vienna (2000) - shed new light on the relatively obscure work.