Good Rep - October

I experienced a crippling twang of cineaste envy recently while reading Multiglom, the ace blog by film critic Anne Billson. The particular post that induced my jealousy, entitled Rep Tales (And Other Cinema Memories), was her evocative paean the sticky carpets and trench coat wearing cliental of London’s repertory scene in the 70s and 80s. I was born too late and too far from the crumbling movie palaces of the Scala and the Electric to experience this glorious death rattle of revival cinema. While Billson was enjoying a diverse diet of old movies on the big screen, from Death in Venice and Seven Samurai to Reefer Madness! and Thundercrack!, I was scrabbling a film education in a village where the bus ride to the nearest picture house was longer than the average feature running time and the local video store (read petrol garage) might have stocked the same pornos that were these rep theatres' main stock-in-trade but there was no Visconti or Kurosawa to balance out the T&A. By the time I made it to anything approaching a metropolis, as a student in Glasgow, the idea of cinema programmes dedicated to classic and cult film had been dead for over a decade thanks to the home video boom.

Like herpes and the Tory party, however, cinephilia never dies. Revival cinema in the 21st century now dukes it out with the latest art house releases – as well as middlebrow bollocks like National Theatre Live and Wimbledon – for space on the big screen, and judging from recent programming at the Cameo, DCA, Filmhouse and GFT, repertory cinema, if not winning, is at least off the ropes. Celluloid fetishising programmers such as Matt Palmer (whose fantastic Psychotronic Cinema series returns this month with Dario Argento's Bird with the Crystal Plumage (GFT, 19 Oct) and an inspired double-feature pairing of Paul Morrissey's beautiful and bonkers Blood For Dracula with the erotic escapades of Ilsa: Tigress of Siberia (Filmhouse, 20 Oct)) are still willing to scour the globe for rare film prints to be dusted off for a whirl through the projector. And distributors BFI and Park Circus, organisations dedicated to preserving and exhibiting the images and ideas from eleven decades of filmmaking, seem to be convincing cinemas to give up more and more programme space to their digitally restored rereleases. Billson’s warts and all love letter to rep cinema-going, combined with the particularly rude health of rep programming displayed in the October programmes of Scotland’s art house cinemas, has inspired me to start a regular blog about the most eye-catching rep screenings happening around the country each month. 

Ok, so the Cameo doesn’t have a flea-bitten cat that’ll pounce on you during a scary moment of its All Night Horror Madness! (15 Oct) – as the Scala famously offered during Shock Around The Clock – and Aidan Moffat or Stuart Murdoch aren't likely to interrupt François Truffaut's Day for Night (10-12 Oct) at the GFT by taking a slash in the back row of cinema one — as Billson hilariously recalls Shane MacGowan doing during a William Castle all-nighter — but you can’t have everything. Today’s theatres may be a bit more gentrified than the ones in the pre-VHS repertory cinema golden age, but, as the following five rep screenings in October show, the films are as debased as ever.

Czech film-maker Ivan Passer’s sun-drenched noir Cutter’s Way (18-19 Oct, Filmhouse), from 1981, should be filed alongside Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success and Roman Polanski’s Chinatown as one of the great European sideways glances at America’s seedy underbelly. Opening with a young woman’s corpse being unceremoniously dumped in a trashcan, the film filters the previous decade's post-Vietnam bitterness into a sinewy, character rich thriller. Suntanned hustler Bone (Jeff Bridges) witnesses the corpse disposal and tells his best friend Cutter (John Heard), a 'Nam-vet disenchanted with the nation he lost an arm, an eye and possibly his mind fighting for, who in turn persuades the reluctant Bone to help him investigate the crime. Bridges and Heard are exceptional in their roles but Lisa Eichhorn blows them both out the water with her haunting performance as depressed alcoholic Mo, Cutter’s wife and Bone’s lover.

La Piscine (2-3 Nov, GFT) goes one better than Cutter’s Way’s threesome with a sizzling ménage à quatre. On the baking hot poolside of their Côte d'Azur Villa, a young couple, played by Alain Delon and Romy Schneider, appear to be having a who can look sexier in their bathing suit competition. This seemingly idyllic love nest is interrupted when old friend Harry (Maurice Ronet), a record producer with a crocodile grin and an appetite for women and partying that would exhaust Bacchus, visits unannounced. Following at Harry’s heel is his jail-bait daughter, played by a young Jane Birkin, who’s unconvincingly hiding her sex appeal behind some Deirdre Barlow specs. Despite the four’s frequent visits to the pool, the atmosphere in this little-seen chamber piece from journeyman director Jacques Deray remains suffocating, dripping with Chabrolian sex and cynicism.

La Piscine (Jacques Deray, 1969)

I’ve not seen 1969’s I Start Counting (30 Oct, GFT), the second film in the new season from the Monorail Film Club, but British films from the late 60s/early 70s have been proving rich pickings for repertory programmers of late. The BFI have been raiding this period recently for its fabulous Flipside strand, unearthing quixotic oddities such as Jerzy Skolimowski's Deep End and Richard Lester’s The Bed Sitting Room, and the 2010 Edinburgh International Film Festival built a great retrospective, called ‘After the Wave’, around forgotten films from this post British New Wave era. Plus, it’s been selected by The Pastels’ frontman and Monorail Film Club founder Stephen McRobbie, who’s shown impeccable taste with his previous film club picks.

With We Need To Talk About Kevin released at the end of the month, the opportunity to see Lynne Ramsey’s audacious first feature Ratcatcher (23 Oct, GFT) on the big screen again is a welcome one. In this poetic coming-of-age film Ramsey seamlessly marries the grim realities of growing up poor in 70s Glasgow with the strikingly beautiful imagery and elliptical story telling that has become her trademark. The tumultuous childhood of Ratcatcher's jug-eared protagonist James should make for a fascinating double-bill with the life of the eponymous troubled adolescent in Ramsey’s latest.

I can’t guarantee quality with my final recommendation as I’ve not seen it for the best part of two decades, but my thirteen-year-old self would tell you that Maniac Cop (29 Oct, DCA), the frenetic 1987 action film about a turnip-faced killer posing as a Big Apple cop, starring Bruce (Evil Dead’s Ash) Campbell as a real cop trying to catch the madman and Richard (Shaft) Roundtree as his ball-breaking superior, is awesome. The film is showing in a double bill with recent American horror movie The Dead as part of Dundead, the small but perfectly formed horror festival happening at DCA 28-30 October.

Maniac Cop (William Lustig, 1988)