News

'Saint Joan': Constance Cummings as the George Bernard Shaw heroine. Constance Cummings on stage: From sex-change farce and Emma Bovary to Juliet and 'Saint Joan' (See previous post: “Constance Cummings: Frank Capra, Mae West and Columbia Lawsuit.”) In the mid-1930s, Constance Cummings landed the title roles in two of husband Benn W. Levy's stage adaptations: Levy and Hubert Griffith's Young Madame Conti (1936), starring Cummings as a demimondaine who falls in love with a villainous character. She ends up killing him – or does she? Adapted from Bruno Frank's German-language original, Young Madame Conti was presented on both sides of the Atlantic; on Broadway, it had a brief run in spring 1937 at the Music Box Theatre. Based on the Gustave Flaubert novel, the Theatre Guild-produced Madame Bovary (1937) was staged in late fall at Broadway's Broadhurst Theatre. Referring to the London production of Young Madame Conti, The...

Above: Japanese B1 poster for Accident (Joseph Losey, UK, 1967).

With the 67th Cannes Film Festival on the eve of its award ceremony, Film Forum is reviving the winner of Grand Prix du Jury from the festival’s 20th edition, Joseph Losey’s Accident. The top prize (then the Grand Prix du Festival, now the Palme d’Or) of that year, 1967, went to Antonioni’s Blow-Up, but Accident, written by Harold Pinter, was equally as daring and confounding. Starring Dirk Bogarde (who had worked his magic with Losey and Pinter four years earlier in The Servant), Stanley Baker and Jacqueline Sassard, Accident is a Resnaisian time-shifting mind-boggler set among the dreaming spires of Oxford rather than Antonioni’s Swinging Sixties London.

A film that has been almost impossible see for many years, Accident has been digitally restored by Rialto Pictures and will be traveling around the country. I’ve collected as...