Some Like It Classic

Ten silent and sound movie masterpieces: Some Like It Classic, the Palazzo dell’Esposizioni’s event that has become something of a tradition with classic 35mm movies screened in a movie theatre the way they were meant to be seen, is back for its eleventh edition. Thanks to the collaboration with the Sindacato Nazionale Critici Cinematografici Italiani, the National Italian Cinema Critics Union, each film is introduced and explained by a different critic, thus offering audiences an extra interpretative key during viewing.

The retrospective kicks off with Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, directed in 1964 by Jacques Demy and winner of the Palme d’Or at the 17th Cannes Film Festival: a fully sung French film that launched the young Catherine Deneuve to stardom. Music also plays a leading role in Ernst Lubitsch’s irresistible Merry Widow, in the legendary musical West Side Story and in Theodor Dreyer’s Mikaël, a jewel from the age of the silent movie that was one of the very first films to discuss homosexuality explicitly. The screening will be accompanied on the piano by Maestro Antonio Coppola.

The great Hollywood cinema comes alive with Paper Moon by Peter Bogdanovich and with two great cult movies of the 1950s: Fred Zinneman’s High Noon and Sidney Lumet’s first film, 12 Angry Men, a still highly topical example of socially committed cinema. Commitment is also very much the name of the game in Mike Leigh’s more recent High Hopes and in the decidedly original war propaganda film 49th Parallel, one of Powell and Pressburger’s first supreme masterpieces. The retrospective winds up with Stranger on the Prowl, a movie that owes its checkered production history precisely to politics: director Joseph Losey couldn’t put his name to it because he had been blacklisted for anti-American activities during filming.

Admission free while places last – reservations required.