DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Jezebel and Hallelujah
Welcome to January, when most theaters are treading water, keeping their rosters pretty constant to give you the best chance you can of winning your office Oscar pool. Even the AFI is taking a break from its usual heavy rotation of special events and retrospectives and is showing pretty much the same three movies for the next three weeks. With that in mind, and since we’ve already told you what we think of most of the end-of-the year releases, we’ll concentrate on museum and one-of-a-kind screenings this week. Starting with the Postal Museum. They don’t show movies that often, but how many movies apart from Charade can you think of that have a direct philately tie-in? All the more surprising then that they’ve got a double-feature on tap this weekend, but before all the stamp collectors in the audience get too excited, both are films that have been recently commemorated in stamps, rather than movies about daredevil adventures involving the recovery of rare and valuable postage. Now that we mention it, that’s not a bad idea for the next Indiana Jones sequel; couldn’t be any worse than the last one, at any rate.
First up on the Postal Museum’s double bill is Jezebel, William Wyler’s pre-Gone With the Wind, antebellum drama about a southern belle (Bette Davis) with the temerity to wear a red dress to a ball where all the single girls are expected to wear white. If that’s not enough to give the other ladies a case of the vapors, she does it to humiliate a man (Henry Fonda) who had the nerve to refuse to go shopping with her. Davis won her second and final Academy Award for the role (though she’d go on to be nominated eight more times), in a film that is somewhat more obscure than it might have been, had a more epic treatment of a strong-willed woman not overshadowed it the following year. This is followed by Hallelujah, a musical about the tumultuous life of a southern sharecropper, notable for being one of the first Hollywood films with an entirely African-American cast. Hollywood legend King Vidor directed, and it was a first for him as well, being his first sound film; he had more than just an artistic stake in the outcome, as MGM forced him to put his salary back into the picture’s production, just in case the “risky” film failed.
View the trailer for Jezebel.
Saturday afternoon at the National Postal Museum. Jezebel begins at 1 p.m., Hallelujah at 3 p.m. Free.
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Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust
In a year that saw two major motion pictures associated with the Holocaust, both of which were accused of cheapening their subject with cheap melodrama, it’s a more than fitting time for a screening of Danny Anker’s little-seen documentary about how Hollywood has treated the tragedy over the years. Anker traces the relationship between Hollywood and Germany back to the very beginning of Hitler’s rise, when Germany and the movie industry had a nice little business relationship going that may have influenced the media to soft-pedal the threat posed by the Third Reich, and follows it on through to more recent years, when the detailing of the horrors has become more graphic. But even the most celebrated films about the Holocaust have not been without controversy or detractors, and Anker addresses the complex and difficult debates over how the Holocaust has been portrayed on film. Anker has taken some criticism himself for not opening up his own movie beyond the scope of Hollywood, and missing a more worldwide context. But since it’s considered tacky to raise any arguments against a film with Holocaust themes, as if it’s virtue enough to be tackling the material at all, it’s nice to know someone wants to get people talking.
Sunday morning at 10:30 at the Avalon. Director (and Potomac, MD native) Danny Anker will lead a discussion after the film. $12.
