Film Ahead is a weekly column highlighting special events and repertory programming for the discerning Camberville filmgoer. It also includes capsule reviews of films that are not feature reviewed.
The Wicked Queer Film Festival continues through the weekend at The Brattle Theatre, and while Tom Meek did an excellent job encapsulating the scope of the fest last week, there are a couple of upcoming rediscoveries simply too intriguing not to highlight. The first is 1972’s rarely seen, phenomenally titled “Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers,” which screens Saturday. Described as a “sketch comedy musical” and compared to the notorious underground films of Robert Downey Sr., the film is perhaps most notable for its lead performance by trans icon and Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn (that’s her hitchhiking from Miami, F-L-A in the first verse of Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side”). The following night, the festival presents Antonio Carlos da Fontoura’s 1974 Brazilian crime-comedy whatsit “The Devil Queen” (“A Rainha Diaba”), described in the festival notes as “if John Waters and ‘Pulp Fiction’ had a gay child who is campy, transgressive and loves drag and crime.” It’s hard to think of a combination of words that more perfectly captures the spirit and energy of this trailblazing festival.
The Somerville Theatre augments its “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid”-inspired repertory series (which continues this week with “The Postman Always Rings Twice” and “The Bribe” on Monday) with 4K restorations of a pair of very different film noir landmarks. First up, we celebrate the 75th anniversary of one of the genre’s all-timers, 1949’s “The Third Man.” “The Third Man” was directed by the English journeyman director Carol Reed (who would win an Academy Award nearly two decades later for “Oliver!”), but it is most well known for the involvement of Orson Welles, who appears dramatically halfway through the film as the nefarious Harry Lime and promptly steals the show (Welles claimed from time to time to have directed some or all of the film; this probably isn’t true, but he did write Lime’s iconic “cuckoo clock” monologue). Less famous, but no less notable, is Bertrand Tavernier’s 1981 “Coup de Torchon,” a Senegal-set slice of post-new wave neo-noir featuring a young Isabelle Huppert. The films screen as a double feature on Saturday and Sunday.
If you’re looking for a big-screen experience even more rare than “Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers,” it should come as no surprise that the Harvard Film Archive has your back. On Friday and Saturday, the HFA presents a two-night series titled “Being in a Place: Rediscovering Margaret Tait.” Scottish poet and filmmaker Tait worked for decades under her own Ancona Films shingle; her shorts are gentle and almost impossibly intimate, shot in the rolling fields of her home in the Orkney Islands and frequently soundtracked by the director’s own poetry. The HFA’s programs are curated and hosted by filmmakers Ute Aurand (whose own Orkney-shot films bookend the first night) and Luke Fowler (whose hourlong 2022 portrait of Tait, “Being in a Place,” lends the series its title and serves as the centerpiece of the second). Almost all of the films will be shown in their original 16 mm format, which likely makes these screenings a once-in-a-lifetime event for fans of truly independent film.
April 15 is, of course, Marathon Monday, and The Brattle will showcase a marathon of its own in its yearly “Muppet Madness” triple feature. The day kicks off at noon with Jim Henson and Frank Oz’s 1982 fantasy epic “The Dark Crystal,” which is by any metric one of the most startlingly ambitious and avant-garde American studio films of the 1980s (let alone made for children!). Following that is 1996’s “Muppet Treasure Island,” which tends to get overshadowed by its predecessor, “The Muppet Christmas Carol,” but is just as fun and colorful and features Tim Curry having the time of his life as Long John Silver. The program closes, as it must, with a 35 mm screening of 1979’s “The Muppet Movie,” which stands as perhaps the most giddily infectious showcase of Henson and company’s boundless imagination. After all these years, you will still believe a frog can ride a bicycle.
Back at the Somerville, the “Tale of Two Studios” series continues Wednesday with two of the most enduring and beloved films of the classic Hollywood era. There isn’t much that hasn’t been said about MGM’s entry this time around: “The Wizard of Oz,” which remains in constant rotation 85 years after its release and will likely still be enjoyed by the children of children yet to be born. Even if you’ve seen it dozens of times (it’s one of those rare films for which that’s probably not an exaggeration), the craft on display is staggering, its intricate costumes and eye-popping Technicolor representing the MGM factory at its Zenith. On the Columbia side, we’ve got Frank Capra’s 1934 screwball comedy “It Happened One Night,” the first, and still one of the only, films to sweep the top five categories at the Oscars (Best Picture, Director, Lead Actor and Actress, and Original or Adapted Screenplay). This is the sort of film they don’t make anymore – and couldn’t just a year later, once the Hays production code put the kibosh on the sort of innuendo-laden chemistry that bubbles between Claudette Colbert’s dotty heiress and Clark Gable’s raffish reporter. Both films find their heroines making their way down a long and winding road, whether by donning a pair of ruby slippers or by showing enough leg to entice a passing motorist.
Lastly, The Brattle once again partners with the Space Consortium to present the 2024 Space Film Festival. The theme of this year’s schedule is “Space Safety and Security,” and the first three films in the series certainly represent extreme lapses of both. Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 “2001: A Space Odyssey,” which kicks off the series Monday and screens again on April 20, imagines a future in which artificial intelligence eavesdrops on its human users and supersedes their own judgment (of all the fanciful ideas!). Danny Boyle’s “Sunshine” (which screens Tuesday) sets its sights on climate change, as a team of astronauts (including future Oscar-winners Michelle Yeoh and Cillian Murphy and future superhero Chris Evans) attempt to jump-start a dying sun. Those films, as plausible as they are, remain science fiction (at least for now); Alfonso Cuarón’s “Gravity” (Wednesday), meanwhile, tells of an entirely possible disaster in which a freak accident leaves Sandra Bullock’s spacewalking scientist adrift in the depths of space. If these sound too heavy, don’t worry: The last two will be followed by discussions with panels of experts who will (hopefully) talk you down.
Oscar Goff is a writer and film critic based in Somerville. He is film editor and senior critic for the Boston Hassle and his work has appeared in the monthly Boston Compass newspaper and publications such as WBUR’s The ARTery and iHeartNoise. He is a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Boston Online Film Critics Association, and the Online Film Critics Society.
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