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PARTISAN REVIEW
blatancy illuminate one another in surprising ways. Both films are
about emotional deprivation. The Society, which also puts out an
intelligent journal called
Movietone News,
concerns itself with show–
ing films that are not readily available elsewhere. In the past season,
one might have seen Godard's
Weekend
and
Pierrot Ie Fou,
Nicholas
Ray's
Johnny Guitar,
Murnau's
Tabu,
Sayajit Ray's
Distant Thunder,
Peckinpah's
The Wild Bunch
(restored European version), Polanski's
masterpiece,
Cul-de-Sac,
Bertolucci's
The Spider's Stratagem,
Douglas
Sirk's remarkable use of black and white cinemascope,
The Tarnished
Angels,
Renoir's
Boudu Saved from Drowning,
two rarely shown
Hitchcocks,
Rich and Strange
and
Number Seventeen,
Max Ophul's
The Reckless Moment
and Frank Capra's
The Bitter T ea of General
Yen
and
Dirigible.
The metal folding chairs, which provide the only
seating, demand more uncompromising commitment than those of us
with bad backs can readily sustain.
The most beautiful film house in Seattle is a converted mansion
called the Harvard Exit (named after the sign on the freeway). The
lobby of the Exit is an enormous parlor with comfortable chairs and
couches, and an old piano almost in tune. Good coffee and spice tea are
served without charge, and sometimes crackers and cheese, hors
d'oeuvres before the main course. At times, the owner of the theater
comes out and presumes to introduce the film as if he were its maker.
Recently, I went to see.
Padre Padrone
at the Exit. A friend, a young
novelist from the East, said it was the best movie the Harvard Exit had
ever shown. Maybe so.
Padre Padrone,
a work of considerable intelli–
gence and invention, ran only two weeks, despite respectful reviews
from the local press.
It
was replaced by a revival of
The Tall Blond
Man with One Black Shoe,
the biggest moneymaker in the seven-year
history of the Exit.
From May 11 to May 31, a theater called the Moore Egyptian, as
exotic in its own tacky way as some of the Loew's palaces in New York
City, hosted the Third Seattle International Film Festival, an event of
considerable ambition and civic v,irtue. Fifty films were screened over a
period of three weeks, including some American premieres and a
number of films that had not yet been shown commercially in New
York City. The festival opened with the mutedly sentimental
Madame
Rosa
and closed with Wim Wenders' inside-out
film noir, The Ameri–
can Friend.
Both of these have had ample exposure in the East,
particularly
Madame Rosa,
which won an Academy Award for Best
Foreign Film of the past year. Among the highlights of the Seattle
Festival were Sayajit Ray's
The Chess Players,
the restored version of
Von Sternberg'S
Anathan,
Tachella's
Voyage to Grande Tartary,
