On a Friday earlier this month, with time to spare before a screening of
the Jacques Becker heist classic Touchez
pas au grisbi at the Pacific Film Archive, we stopped by Rasputin’s, a
decades-old Berkeley haunt that deals in new and used records, CDs,
DVDs and Blu-Rays. There I managed to unearth two films, Lubitsch’s
Ninotchka and Truffaut’s Day for Night, along with a ‘70s TV
series, all at a good price. The series is one I’d been only vaguely aware of and knew very little
about, really. The Snoop Sisters (1972
– 1974), starred Helen Hayes and Mildred Natwick as a pair of sisters aptly
named Snoop, one of whom (Hayes) writes mystery novels. The two invariably get
mixed up in solving real crimes (sound familiar?).
August 25th marks the 100th
anniversary of the birth of American composer/conductor/pianist Leonard Bernstein. In
celebration, movie houses around the country are showcasing films scored by the
legendary maestro. My local theater, the
Smith Rafael Film Center (aka/the Rafael), put together a three-film tribute to
Bernstein, with On the Town (1949), On the Waterfront (1954) and West Side Story (1961) screening on separate
Sundays in August.
Have you ever wanted to tour a historic movie
palace? One of those elaborately ornate monuments to cinema constructed during
the Golden Age of American movie theaters, back in the ‘20s and ‘30s? Well, I
have, and luckily for me I live not very far from one of the most spectacular
of them all, the Paramount Theatre in Oakland, CA, a theater that hosts public
tours twice monthly.
