[dundee] Fwd: Film Soc

[Dan Bolser]

Film with a distro in the name...

Yeah, perhaps that really is off topic.


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Matthew Jarron <m.h.jarron at dundee.ac.uk>
Date: 2009/3/20
Subject: Fwd: Film Soc
To:

Hi folks,

Details of next Tuesday's film attached (I'm eager to see it!) and
don't forget that due to the DVD not arriving on time there's still a
chance to see Fernandel in The Little World of Don Camillo at the
Hannah Maclure Movie Club on Monday - all welcome!

Cheers,

Matthew


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Brian Hoyle" <B.P.Hoyle at dundee.ac.uk>
To:
Date: Fri, 20 Mar 2009 13:49:00 +0000
Subject: Film Soc
Dear all,

this coming Tuesday (the 24th) the Film Society will be screening
Billy Wilder's neglected late masterpiece, Fedora (1978). The
penultimate film by one of Hollywood's greatest writer-directors,
Fedora is Wilder's cinematic testament. Dismissed at the time of
release as a senile rehash of his earlier Hollywood melodrama, Sunset
Blvd, Fedora is only superficially similar and is in fact the richer,
more work.

It is deliberately old-fashioned film, which swims against the trend
of the New Hollywood of the 1970s but refuses to sentimentalise the
"good old days" of the studio system in its examination of an ageing
producer (a superb William Holden) who attempts to stage a comeback
for the reclusive star, Fedora.

The end result, which exposes the dark side of Hollywood, shows Wilder
at his most acidic. However, Wilder's cynicism was always a veneer and
underneath it beats the heart of a humanist and a romantic. As Gilbert
Adair writes (just to prove I am not alone in this view), Fedora 'is
the melodrama that a happy few of us consider to be the most sublime
American movie of the 1970s'.

The film will begin just after 7pm in the Frankland Screening Room,
all are welcome.

Brian