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“You’re shivering. Keep your handcuffs hidden and we’ll get some brandy.”

Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger: A Story Of The London Fog (1927) will be showing Wednesday, October 13 at 8 pm. This night is presented by Silents, Please Stl. Tickets are free, but donations are highly appreciated. All donations go to Silents, Please Stl. The Arkadin is located at 5228 Gravois Ave, St Louis, Mo 63116. Films are currently showing on the Backlot Patio (Enter through the Heavy Anchor) and bringing extra lawn chairs is strongly encouraged. Donations are accepted that evening or in advance Here. The Arkadin Cinema site can be found Here

In The Lodger: A Story Of The London Fog, a serial killer known as “the avenger” is murdering blonde women in London. A new lodger, Jonathan Drew, arrives at Mr. and Mrs. Bounting’s in Bloomsbury and rents a room. The man has some strange habits, he...

The River

Written by Rumer Godden and Jean Renoir

Directed by Jean Renoir

France/India/USA, 1951

As the camera looks down upon an ornamental design created from rice powder and water, the narrator (voiced by June Hillman), who speaks throughout the film, welcomes us to the world of The River. This is Bengal, “where the story really happened,” and this is Harriet speaking, reflecting back on her life at a very confusing and significant time. For all intents and purposes, The River is primarily her story. And in this, the film is an intimately personal cinematic memoir. But The River is also something else. In its depiction of the “river people” who inhabit this region of India, the film also takes on an ethnographic appeal, capturing the “flavor” of the setting and its inhabitants.

Guiding this journey is the great French director Jean Renoir, fresh off a tumultuous sojourn in Hollywood,...

Criterion repackages Jean Renoir’s 1951 classic The River for Blu-ray, one of the master filmmaker’s several titles in the collection (fans may recall that Renoir’s Grand Illusion was the very first Criterion title). A title significant in many respects, being the first Technicolor film in India and Renoir’s first color feature, it’s simplistic beauty has gone on to influence future generations of filmmakers, including its prominently vocal champion Martin Scorsese. It also served as a launching pad for Satyajit Ray, who worked as an assistant on the film, and who would go on to create his own stunning debut four years later with the first chapter of his Apu trilogy, Pather Panchali (1955).

We experience the childhood of Harriet (Patricia Walters) in retrospect, her off-screen adult voice recounting one particular stretch of time while growing up in India with her mother (Nora Swinburne) and father (Esmond Knight...