The New Orleans social calendar never feels emptier than it does in the summer, when it’s too hot to do much outside the house and anyone with real money leaves town to cool off anyway. As a result, I haven’t been catching many repertory screenings in recent months, as there haven’t been many enticing opportunities on offer. Smaller series like ScreamFest NOLA and Gap Tooth Cinema have been on summer hiatus, and the legacy institution of the Rene Brunet Classic Movies series has been on TCM-programming autopilot. Now that summer is officially over, though, the city is coming back to life, and the local classic-movies scene is waking up along with it. After only catching three rep screenings all summer (one-off showings of All the President’s Men, Under the Cherry Moon, and Sleepaway Camp), I’m once again hitting up my regular rotation of classic-movies hot spots. It’s like the fall semester of film school just started, with a randomized syllabus of vintage movie titles worth experiencing big & loud with a studious crowd. To that end, here are a few quick reviews of the local repertory screenings I happened to catch over the past couple weeks, now that school is back in session.

Jason and the Argonauts (1963)
@ Rene Brunet’s Classic Movies (The Prytania)

One of the biggest new releases of the summer—both in production scale and in box office returns—was Christopher Nolan’s ensemble-cast adaptation of The Odyssey, which The Prytania tirelessly ran on a 70mm film print every night for a solid month. The Odyssey also seemingly inspired a recent selection for their Classic Movies series: 1963’s Jason and the Argonauts, another sword-and-sandal action epic inspired by Greek myth & poetry. The two behemoth actioners made for an instructive contrast-and-compare exercise, illustrating how Hollywood spectacle has changed over the years. Jason and the Argonauts boasts all of the island-hopping special effects showcases of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey without any of the procedural justification weighing down the bookends. Nolan makes you spend a tedious amount of time farting around a banquet hall with Tom Holland & John Leguizamo before he rewards your patience with the monsters, witches, and goddesses that liven up the middle stretch of The Odyssey, while older modes of Hollywood action filmmaking don’t feel the need to justify the indulgence. Jason and the Argonauts throws giants, harpies, and hydra heads at its audience as quickly as it can, only pulling away from the action to show the gods watching it unfold in amusement on their divine television. Once Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion skeleton army is defeated at the climax, the movie ends abruptly, knowing better than to bore its audience with the journey home. You’ve already gotten what you paid to see, now be on your merry way.

Black God, White Devil (1964)
@ Gap Tooth Cinema (The Broad)

One movie that’s in less of a rush to satisfy or entertain is the 1964 arthouse Western whatsit Black God, White Devil, which played to an unusually quiet crowd at its recent Gap Tooth screening. In Western terms, it’s helpful to think of it more in parallel with Jodorowsky than with Eastwood, since it’s more interested in the mood & iconography of the Western than any of the genre’s narrative payoffs. Black God, White Devil is not a proper Western so much as it is a Brazilian class-politics screed melted down in the midday sun and then loosely remolded into the vague shape of a Western. Landlords, cult leaders, outlaws, and bandits roam the draught-stricken 1940s Brazilian backcountry (the sertão), establishing a make-it-up-as-you-go version of justice as they murder each other for one personal wrong after another. Its violence can be shockingly gnarly, including acts of genital mutilation, flesh flaying, and ritualistic sacrifice of a newborn baby. At other times, its violence is pure genre pastiche, with individual episodes of religious or capitalist injustice being interrupted by unseen six-shooter gunfire while the camera waves around wildly and everyone scrambles for cover. For the most part, though, the movie is interested in talking out its violence in barely coherent mumblings about life’s many cruelties, each player in its wasteland crime saga dehydrated to the point of raving delirium. Its scene-to-scene logic is difficult to follow, and its donkey-trot pacing is brutally slow, but its political anger is clearly communicated through every frame all the same.

Elevator to the Gallows (1958)
@ Films on the Green (Alliance Française)

As the temperature cools in early fall, people start hosting free outdoor screenings of cinematic classics around New Orleans’s various social hubs, usually marketed as family-friendly movie nights showing recent animated favorites. On the more daring end of that fall-semester ritual, the French cultural hub Alliance Française is hosting a series called Films on the Green this month, which they kicked off with 1958’s Elevator to the Gallows. Their introduction to the film claimed that Louis Malle’s first narrative feature was also the first film of the French New Wave, which feels a little historically dubious but spiritually true. Elevator to the Gallows opens with an amoral yuppie executing a fairly convincing plan to kill his boss and run away with that boss’s widow but then gets stuck in an elevator car mid-escape, leaving him vulnerable to discovery & arrest. Meanwhile, his mistress (the effortlessly chic Jeanne Moreau) and the neighboring flower shop girl are left distraught by his unexplained absence, going mad in the late-night hours waiting for his return. The lovelorn teenager and her reprobate boyfriend steal the amateur assassin’s car and commit other crimes under his alias, while Moreau listlessly wanders the rainy streets of Paris to an improvised jazz score from none other than Miles Davis. Elevator to the Gallows truly is a perfect encapsulation of the French New Wave project in the way it uses noirish American crime thriller tropes as an excuse for high-style, street-level renegade filmmaking, even if Malle’s name is far from the first to come to mind when citing the pioneers on the inside of the movement: Varda, Godard, Truffaut, etc.

Pandora’s Box (1929)
@ David Bradley’s Classic Silent Films (Zeitgeist Theatre & Lounge)

If the jazzy arthouse noir flourishes of Elevator to the Gallows trumpeted the earliest notes of the French New Wave, then 1929’s Pandora’s Box signaled the arrival of an even earlier icon of cinematic cool. There’s something undeniably foundational about Louise Brooks’s gothy flapper vibe in this silent-era German classic, to the point where it’s almost Biblical. If I could quote Genesis, “On the eight day, G.W. Pabst said let there be a party girl with a blunt bob, and there was a party girl with a blunt bob. And people saw the bob and saw that it was cool as fuck.” Of course, no pleasure-seeking woman of the silver screen gets by without being punished for her hedonism, so Brooks’s iconic character Lulu is inevitably put through the ringer in the second half of Pandora’s Box, after the audience gets plenty of time to celebrate her for being the coolest woman who ever lived in the first. She drinks, she dances, she parties, she sleeps around, and then she temporarily lucks into marrying a wealthy man before being forced to shoot him dead. On the run from the law, her fabulous party girl lifestyle quickly falls apart, and the “Fucking Around” opening half of the film is equally balanced out by the unavoidable “Finding Out” concluding half. You can always tell that these classic road-to-ruin cautionary tales never really believe their own bullshit; they have way too much fun indulging in hedonistic excess for the audience to fully believe the tragic cosmic punishments that follow in moral rebuke. That aspect of Pandora’s Box was only underlined by its live-piano scoring at the Zeitgeist, which had to compete with the booming sound of bounce DJ sets from the party venue next door. Even when the mood got somber in the more dramatic back half, the first-half party still persistently echoed in the room. No matter what happens to her, Lulu remains aspirationally cool and fun to be around – poor thing.

-Brandon Ledet