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16mm DOUBLE FEATURE NIGHT June 7th – YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN and CAPONE (1975)
Join us for some old-school 16mm Movie Madness! – It’s our monthly 16MM DOUBLE FEATURE NIGHT at The Way Out Club (2525 Jefferson Avenue in St. Louis) ! Join We Are Movie Geeks‘ Tom Stockman and Roger from “Roger’s Reels’ for a double feature of two complete films projected on 16mm film. The show is Tuesday June 7th and starts at 8pm. Admission is FREE though we will be setting out a jar to take donations for theNational Children’s Cancer Society.
First up is YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN
Mel Brooks hit all nails right on the head in his black & white classic from 1974. Taking its themes from the Mary Shelley novel and providing some spot-on homage/parody to the James Whale classic BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (and plenty of references to SON OF FRANKENSTEIN as well), YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN is a breathless laugh and a half. In a weak comedy, you have the entire cast setting up one character for the laughs. Here, you have every character providing humor in every scene. None more than the late Marty Feldman as Igor, who slyly seems to know that he is in a parody movie. (Note how his hump changes sides and his occasional hilarious double takes and asides). Teri Garr is a combination of fabulously sexy and extremely funny – a difficult combination to pull off. Madeline Khan is hysterical as usual as the frigid fiancé Elizabeth, whose long dormant sexuality is awakened by the monster himself. And of course, there is Gene Wilder, the straight man in this madness, deflecting jokes, setting up pratfalls, while all the while trying desperately to bring his monster to life. Also play close attention to the Inspector, a small role played by Kenneth Mars, who played the psychotic Nazi composer Franz Liebkind in Brooks earlier film THE PRODUCERS. YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN has not aged a bit.
Next is CAPONE (1975)
CAPONE is an exploitive take (not surprising since Roger Corman produced it!) on the life of Al Capone from 1975 starring Ben Gazzara as Big Al and a pre-ROCKY Sylvester Stallone as his enforcer Frank Nitti. CAPONE follows Al Capone from his early days as a hot-headed hoodlum in Brooklyn to the Chicago gang wars of the Roaring Twenties. In between all the violence is a romance involving Susan Blakely as Iris, a hedonistic, flapper who loves the gangster. Director Steve Carver, working from a tough, no-nonsense script by Howard Browne, tells the absorbing story at a brisk pace, stages the thrilling Tommy-gun shoot-outs with muscular aplomb, and maintains a suitably gritty and hard-hitting tone throughout. Carver deserves extra points for his decidedly harsh and unsentimental warts’n’all evocation of the 1920’s period setting and his unsparingly graphic and equally unromanticized depiction of the seamier and vulgar aspects of the mob. John Cassavettes co-stars in this rarely-screened film.
There will be movie trivia with prizes and of course The Way Out Club will have a full bar and Way Out Pizzas for sale. Don’t miss it!
A Afcebook invite for this event can be found HERE
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