13 September 2005

Dream double bill # 1 – ‘Salesman’ and ‘Paper Moon’

Actually got the inspiration for this series, in part from Tom Sutpen who has been excellent at maintaining a blog which contains many great series and a forum called Movie Justice in which I saw synopsis for both ‘Salesman’ and ‘Paper Moon’ as well as other films based around sales and selling.

Anyway it occurred to me that the film programmers do an okay job but most of the time they are reasonably uninspired choices, a cursory glance at this week’s Time Out shows that Riverside Studios have ‘The House of Flying Daggers’ and ‘Kung Fu Hustle’, sometimes really obvious double bills work, Riverside Studios also have also shown ‘The Lavender Hill mob’ and ‘The man in the white suit’ as well as ‘The Postman always rings twice’ (1946) and ‘Mildred Pierce’.
So really this is my idea of what would make an interesting double bill to get people to see more varied films.
This one is called ‘Everything but the Chinese fence’ after the line in ‘Salesman’.

Let me know what you think.

3 comments:

TAS said...

Ah, you've hit upon one of my old gripes from my active cinephile days: bad revival house film programming. It always seemed to me that no one had any imagination; they always seemed to let the most obvious elements lead them by the nose.

It was one of my active fantasies back when to program a rep cinema. I'll probably never get to do it, but I maintain that I could come up with some doozies as far as double bills go.

Excellent idea for a series!

(btw, just got your S&S/Lindsay Anderson packet yesterday. Many many thanks as usual, amigo)

Uncle Gustav said...

One of the very first double bills I caught at a revival theatre (this was before I was aware of or ever heard the term "rep") was a pairing of "To Have and Have Not" plus "What's Up, Tiger Lily?" It was around 1972 and I can remember it as if it happened yesterday. The theatre was the Uniondale Mini Cinema in a suburb of New York. It was run by hippies who let people drink and smoke pot right in the theatre.

Disparate themes work best in pairs, displaying the importance of variety.

When I was living in San Francisco in the late '70s, The Strand theatre had a fascinating double feature shown only on Christmas Day: "Cabaret" plus "The Tenant". They catered to the manic depressives, people like myself who felt awkward and dishonest about the manufactured joy of the season.

shahn said...

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i can't wait to see what you'll do with these.
have fun.